ubiSOAP: A Service Oriented Middleware for Ubiquitous Networking

International audienceThe computing and networking capacities of today's wireless portable devices allow for ubiquitous services, which are seamlessly networked. Indeed, wireless handheld devices now embed the necessary resources to act as both service clients and providers. However, the ubiquitous networking of services remains challenged by the inherent mobility and resource constraints of the devices, which make services a priori highly volatile. This paper discusses the design, implementation and experimentation of the ubiSOAP service-oriented middleware, which leverages wireless networking capacities to effectively enable the ubiquitous networking of services. ubiSOAP specifically defines a layered communication middleware that underlies standard SOAP-based middleware, hence supporting legacy Web Services while exploiting nowadays ubiquitous connectivity

Interoperability of Service Discovery Protocols: Transparent versus Explicit Approaches

International audienceDiscovering networked services in pervasive computing environments is problematic as multiple Service Discovery Protocols (SDPs), differing on their services description formats as well as advertisement and request models, have already become (de-facto) standards. This calls for a solution to SDP interoperability, enabling clients to locate networked services independent of the SDP they use to advertise their presence. In this paper, we report on our experience in developing two such solutions: the transparent approach of INDISS based on message translation, and the explicit approach of MSDA based on protocol integration. While efficient and able to support legacy clients and services, INDISS is limited by the basic service information available in existing SDPs, and assumptions about the network protocols used by the SDPs. Advanced discovery features required by pervasive environments, such as context or security management, can only be provided by more complex discovery frameworks like MSDA, but come at a price

A flexible QoS-aware routing protocol for infrastructure-less B3G networks

International audienceCurrent mobile devices support multiple network technolo- gies and network composition via such devices can enable service provisioning across heterogeneous networks. One of the key challenges for realizing this view is inter-domain routing. Indeed, given the diversity of involved network technologies and infrastructures, a exible routing protocol that takes into account their quality properties and dynam- ics is an important requirement. In this paper, we present a exible quality-aware routing protocol for infrastructure-less B3G environments that enables discovery of routes with op- timal bandwidth, delay or cost according to the preference of each client. The protocol is based on the Optimized Link- State Routing (OLSR) protocol and is designed to enable computation of quality-aware routes in multi-network envi- ronments. We detail the protocol, discuss its deployment and provide experimental results

Interoperable Semantic & Syntactic Service Matching for Ambient Computing Environments

International audienceThe inherent heterogeneity of ambient computing environments and their constant evolution requires middleware platforms to manage networked components designed, developed and deployed independently. Such management must also be efficient to cater for resource-constrained devices and highly dynamic situations due to the spontaneous appearance and disappearance of networked resources. For service discovery protocols (SDP), one of the main functions of service-oriented architectures (SOA), the efficiency of the matching of syntactic service descriptions is most often opposed to the fullness of the semantic approach. As part of the PLASTIC middleware for ambient computing environments, we present in this paper an interoperable service matching and ranking platform, which is able to process service descriptions from both semantic and syntactic service description languages. To that end, we define a generic, modular description language able to record service functional properties, potentially extended with semantic annotations. An evaluation of the prototype implementation of our platform demonstrates that multi-protocols service matching supporting various levels of expressiveness can be achieved in ambient computing environments

Dos and Don'ts in Mobile Phone Sensing Middleware: Learning from a Large-Scale Experiment

International audienceMobile phone sensing contributes to changing the way we approach science: massive amount of data is being contributed across places and time, and paves the way for advanced analyses of numerous phenomena at an unprecedented scale. Still, despite the extensive research work on enabling resource-efficient mobile phone sensing with a very-large crowd, key challenges remain. One challenge is facing the introduction of a new heterogeneity dimension in the traditional middleware research landscape. The middleware must deal with the heterogeneity of the contributing crowd in addition to the system's technical heterogeneities. In order to tackle these two heterogeneity dimensions together, we have been conducting a large-scale empirical study in cooperation with the city of Paris. Our experiment revolves around the public release of a mobile app for urban pollution monitoring that builds upon a dedicated mobile crowd-sensing middleware. In this paper, we report on the empirical analysis of the resulting mobile phone sensing efficiency from both technical and social perspectives, in face of a large and highly heterogeneous population of participants. We concentrate on the data originating from the 20 most popular phone models of our user base, which represent contributions from over 2,000 users with 23 million observations collected over 10 months. Following our analysis, we introduce a few recommendations to overcome-technical and crowd-heterogeneities in the implementation of mobile phone sensing applications and supporting middleware

Efficient Context-aware Service Discovery in Multi-Protocol Pervasive Environments

International audienceService discovery is a critical functionality of emerging pervasive computing environments. In such environments, service discovery mechanisms need to (i) overcome the heterogeneity of hardware devices, software platforms, and networking infrastructures; and (ii) provide users with an accurate selection of services that meet their current requirements. To address these issues, we have developed the Multi- Protocol Service Discovery and Access (MSDA) middleware platform2, which provides context-aware service discovery and access in pervasive environments. This paper primarily focuses on the design and implementation of the context-awareness support of MSDA. Context-awareness not only provides a more accurate service selection, but also enables a more efficient dissemination of service requests across heterogeneous pervasive environments. We present the design and prototype implementation of MSDA, along with experimental results that demonstrate the advantages derived by introducing context awareness

DESIRE: Leveraging the best of centralized and decentralized contact tracing systems

International audienceContact tracing in case of pandemic is becoming an essential mitigation tool for national health services to break infection chains and prevent the virus from spreading further. To support manual tracing, several countries have been developing contact tracing apps that detect nearby mobile phones using Bluetooth. Such data collection raised privacy concerns and several privacy-preserving protocols have been proposed to prevent the leakage of personal and sensitive information. These solutions are mainly divided into two categories using a centralized or a decentralized exposure score computation. However, both approaches depict limitations. This paper presents Desire, a novel exposure notification system which leverages the best of centralized and decentralized systems. As opposed to existing contact tracing schemes, Desire leverages Private Encounter Tokens (Pets) generated locally on the device that uniquely identify an encounter between two nodes while being private and unlinkable by the server. The role of the server is merely to match PETs generated by diagnosed users with the pets provided by requesting users. Our privacy risk analysis shows that Desire drastically improves privacy against malicious users (i.e., limitation of decentralized systems) and authority (i.e., limitation of centralised systems). We implemented Desire, evaluated it in real condition, and show it feasibility

Deliverable D6.4: Assessment report: Experimenting with CONNECT in Systems of Systems, and Mobile Environments

The core objective of WP6 is to evaluate the CONNECT technologies under realistic situations. To achieve this goal, WP6 concentrated a significant amount of its 4th year effort on the finalization of the implementation of the GMES scenario defined during the 3rd year. The GMES scenario allows the consortium to assess the validity of CONNECT claims and to investigate the exploitation of CONNECT technologies to deal with the integration of real systems. In particular, GMES requires the connection of highly heterogeneous and independently built systems provided by the industry partners. WP6 contributed also in providing mobile collaborative applications and case studies showing the exploitation of CONNECTORs on mobile devices

Experiment scenarios, prototypes and report - Iteration 2

The task of WP6 is to evaluate the CONNECT technologies under realistic situations. To achieve this goal, WP6 concentrated its 3rd year effort on the development of a main scenario in the context of GMES, which requires the connection of highly heterogeneous and independently built systems provided by the industry partners. The resulting scenario allows the consortium to assess the validity of CONNECT claims and to investigate the exploitation of CONNECT technologies in the context of the integration of real systems. Another objective of this report is to provide a first assessment of CONNECT solutions against the project's objectives stated in the DoW. The proposed assessment spans: (i) the project's overall objective of enabling on-the-fly interoperability among heterogeneous networked systems as well as (ii) the project's specific objectives related to the foundations and associated enablers to be elaborated for learning and reasoning about the interaction behaviours of networked systems and for synthesizing mediators so as to make systems interoperate