面向普适计算的动态自适应中间件模型

为了提高普适计算系统的开发效率, 设计了一个基于OSGi框架的动态普适计算中间件模型. 该中间件模型以OSGi框架为基础, 建立移动管理器管理用户和服务的移动, 利用上下文管理器来管理上下文, 动态调整自己的行为, 支持上下文感知应用. 通过标准的接口实现各种异构普适设备间的互操作性. 实验结果表明该中间件能够满足通用普适计算环境的要求, 对于普适计算系统的开发具有一定的借鉴意义.     

一个适用于遍在计算环境的中间件体系结构框架

1.背景随着计算技术和通信技术的发展,不仅桌式计算机变得非常普遍,非PC设备正以惊人的速度成为市场的主流,如:机顶盒、移动电话、PDA、家用电器、汽车电子、游戏机等等。特别是随着家庭网络和无线网络的发展,网络变得更加的普遍。计算已经不只限于桌面,它渗透到人们生活和工作的各个环节,这就是所谓的无处不在的计算环境(pervasive computing,简称遍在计算环境)。在这样的环境中,人们希望:即使他们在频繁地移动,或者各种资源在动态地加入或离开,他     

A mobility-aware dynamic database caching scheme for wireless mobile computing and communications

This paper describes a mobility-aware dynamic database caching scheme for wireless mobile computing and communications. A mobile-floating agent scheme is proposed, in which caching techniques are cognizant of the mobile nature of mobile users and the location-sensitive nature of mobile systems. The mobile-floating agent maintains a second class cache in the fixed network and employs Barbara's invalidation reports broadcasting cache consistency strategies to maintain a dynamic cache consistent with the first class cache in the mobile client. The invalidation reports broadcasting scheme is combined with knowledge of the mobility behavior of each individual mobile user and broadcasts of invalidation reports only occur within the user's mobility area. The evaluation results show that, for a large system (200 cells), this scheme can reduce the system cost by more than 87%, for even highly mobile users, compared with a fully replicated database system.Recommended by: Daniel Barbara, Ravi Jain and Narayanan Krishnakumar     

An Effective Model and Management Scheme of Personal Space for Ubiquitous Computing Applications

In ubiquitous computing, the computing environment for a user is no longer a fixed computer, but a space that includes multiple heterogeneous devices that can change dynamically according to the user's situation. Managing the space is an essential part of ubiquitous computing because application services in this environment need to be adaptive to the users' current situation. However, previous approaches oversimplified the model of personal space and demonstrated some limitations in developing user-centric adaptive services. In this paper, we propose an effective personal space model, defined as virtual personal world (VPW), and a sophisticated method to manage personal spaces. The VPW represents a personal space by using a set of stateful elements and their relationships, which are denoted as virtual objects, services, and neighbors. The VPW provides expressive and accurate information for a particular user, thereby helping application services adapt their operations for the user dynamically. Our conceptual model is designed as personal operating middleware software that manages the user's VPW and provides application services. Experimental results show that the prototype system based on VPW has reasonable performance in running application services and managing personal spaces. We also found that the VPW model can increase the average user satisfaction rate by up to 40% compared to other models in our simulation environment.      

SARA: A service architecture for resource aware ubiquitous environments

Realizing the potential of pervasive computing will be predicated upon the availability of a flexible, mobility-aware infrastructure and technologies to support seamless service management, provisioning and delivery. Despite advances in routing and media access control technologies, little progress has been made towards large-scale deployment of services and applications in pervasive and ubiquitous environments. The lack of a fixed infrastructure, coupled with the time-varying characteristics of the underlying network topology, makes service delivery challenging. This paper addresses these challenges and presents SARA, a unified, overlay-based service architecture to support large-scale service and application deployment in pervasive and ubiquitous environments. We discuss the main functionalities of SARA and present the algorithms for object registration and discovery. SARA also considers the mobility of the nodes in the network and provides a mechanism by which this can be incorporated into the framework. Finally, the proposed architecture was evaluated using simulations and the results show that the architecture performs well under different network conditions.     

From devices to tasks: automatic task prediction for personalized appliance control

One of the driving applications of ubiquitous computing is universal appliance interaction: the ability to use arbitrary mobile devices to interact with arbitrary appliances, such as TVs, printers, and lights. Because of limited screen real estate and the plethora of devices and commands available to the user, a central problem in achieving this vision is predicting which appliances and devices the user wishes to use next in order to make interfaces for those devices available. We believe that universal appliance interaction is best supported through the deployment of appliance user interfaces (UIs) that are personalized to a users habits and information needs. In this paper, we suggest that, in a truly ubiquitous computing environment, the user will not necessarily think of devices as separate entities; therefore, rather than focus on which device the user may want to use next, we present a method for automatically discovering the users common tasks (e.g., watching a movie, or surfing TV channels), predicting the task that the user wishes to engage in, and generating an appropriate interface that spans multiple devices. We have several results. We show that it is possible to discover and cluster collections of commands that represent tasks and to use history to predict the next task reliably. In fact, we show that moving from devices to tasks is not only a useful way of representing our core problem, but that it is, in fact, an easier problem to solve. Finally, we show that tasks can vary from user to user.     

基于上下文感知的普适服务框架

为了更好地适应用户的个性化需求和普适计算环境的特征,提出一种基于上下文感知的普适服务框架。该框架包括服务呈现层、服务管理层、服务提供层和上下文感知层。通过基于社区的服务管理方式来屏蔽普适计算环境中服务的异构性、分布性,动态地感知与当前计算环境和用户活动相关的上下文信息,采用基于上下文的服务推荐机制为用户提供个性化的服务,从而更好地适应人的意图和环境 因素。     

普适计算中基于移动代理的应用follow me迁移技术*

为了更好地利用普适计算环境中的计算资源、减少人为干预、提高工作效率,提出了应用的follow-me迁移需求,即计算可以随着用户的移动在异构设备和计算环境中移动,让移动中的用户能够体验到不间断的计算。提出了基于移动代理的普适计算中间件FollowMeAgent。结合情境感知技术,利用软件代理所具备的移动性实现应用的自主迁移,并根据应用特点对迁移策略进行了细分。在此平台上开发了若干应用,通过性能测试证明其可行性和有效性。     

Integration with Web services

There's a difference between what we'd like our enterprise computing systems to be and what they really are. We like to envision them as orderly multitier arrangements comprising software buses, hubs, gateways, and adapters - all deployed at just the right places to maximize scale, load, application utility, and ultimately, business value. Unfortunately, we know that there's a wide gulf between this idealistic vision and reality. In practice, our enterprise computing systems typically are tangles of numerous technologies, protocols, and applications, often hastily hard-wired together with inflexible point-to-point connections. The whole point of middleware is to hide the diversity and complexity of the computing machinery underneath it. By adopting the abstractions that middleware provides, we're supposedly isolating our applications from the variety of ever-changing hardware platforms, operating systems, networks, protocols, and transports that make up our enterprise computing systems. We can use Web services to provide "middleware for middleware" abstraction layer for modern integration applications.     

基于FDI的用户模型及其在上下文觉察计算中的应用

上下文觉察计算是普适计算的重要内容。当前的上下文觉察计算研究大多没有为用户提供个性化的服务。已有的个性化上下文觉察服务的用户模型,其用户偏好的设置比较简单。本文从心理学的观点出发,提出一个使用基于场依存一独立性（FDI）的用户模型来为用户提供个性化的上下文觉察服务。本文系统分析了这种用户模型对上下文觉察计算的重要性,并给出了使用基于FDI的用户模型在上下文觉察计算中的应用过程。试验表明这种模型提供的个性化服务能够提高上下文觉察计算应用的有效性。     

A quality of service driven concurrency framework for object‐based middleware

Threads play a key role in object‐based middleware platforms. Implementers of such platforms can select either kernel or user‐level threads, but neither of these options are ideal. In this paper we introduce Application Scheduler Contexts (ASCs) which flexibly combine both types of thread and thereby attempt to exploit the advantages of each. Multiple ASCs can co‐exist, each with their own concurrency semantics and scheduling policy. ASCs also support quality of service (QoS) configurability, and define their own QoS schema. We show how ASCs can be efficiently implemented and how they can usefully be exploited in middleware environments. We also provide a quantitative evaluation that demonstrates the feasibility of the ASC concept in performance terms. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

MidHDC: Advanced topics on middleware services for heterogeneous distributed computing. Part 2

Currently distributes systems support different computing paradigms like Cluster Computing, Grid Computing, Peer-to-Peer Computing, and Cloud Computing all involving elements of heterogeneity. These computing distributed systems are often characterized by a variety of resources that may or may not be coupled with specific platforms or environments. All these topics challenge today researchers, due to the strong dynamic behavior of the user communities and of resource collections they use.The second part of this special issue presents advances in allocation algorithms, service selection, VM consolidation and mobility policies, scheduling multiple virtual environments and scientific workflows, optimization in scheduling process, energy-aware scheduling models, failure Recovery in shared Big Data processing systems, distributed transaction processing middleware, data storage, trust evaluation, information diffusion, mobile systems, integration of robots in Cloud systems.     

Arcademis: a framework for object‐oriented communication middleware development

This paper presents Arcademis, a Java‐based framework for communication middleware development. Arcademis consists of a set of abstract classes, interfaces and concrete components that define the general architecture of middleware systems. Its main objective is to support the implementation of non‐monolithic and easily configurable middleware platforms. Arcademis can be used by middleware developers to deploy systems that meet the requirements of a particular network or technology. Instances of Arcademis can also be customized by distributed systems engineers to meet the requirements of a particular application. For example, new transport protocols, connection management policies, authentication algorithms or invocation semantics can be easily configured in middleware platforms derived from Arcademis. In order to illustrate the use of the framework, the paper describes the RME system, a middleware derived from Arcademis that adds a remote method invocation service to the CLDC configuration of Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME). Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A multi-agent based user context Bayesian neural network analysis system

The increasing user mobility demands placed upon IT services necessitates an environment that enables users to access optimal services at any time and in any place. This study presents research conducted to develop a system that is capable of analyzing user IT service patterns and tendencies and provides the necessary service resources by sharing each user’s context information. First, each user’s context information is gathered to provide the multi-agent software training data necessary to describe user operations in a hybrid peer-to-peer (P2P) structured communication environment. Next, the data collected about each user’s mobile device is analyzed through a Bayesian based neural network system to identify the user’s tendency and extract essential service information. This information provides a communication configuration allowing the user access to the best communication service between the user’s mobile device and the local server at any time and in any place, thereby enhancing the ubiquitous computing environment.     

基于分布对象技术的移动中间件

基于JavaRMI技术的移动中间件存在一定程度的局限性。文中以中间件、分布对象计算和移动计算等相关领域的技术为背景,提出了基于分布对象技术的移动中间件MMDO(MobileMiddlewareBasedonDistributedObject),该体系结构包括:动态可定制的基础核心、通用移动Agent平台、异步消息服务、动态资源发现和移动用户安全注册。MMDO能够解决移动中间件研究存在的Java效率问题,同时拓展了移动服务,给移动应用提供更好的支撑环境。最后,给出仿真测试结果,证明了MMDO的有效性。     

Ubiquitous enterprise service adaptations based on contextual user behavior

Recent advances in mobile technologies and infrastructures have created the demand for ubiquitous access to enterprise services from mobile handheld devices. Further, with the invention of new interaction devices, the context in which the services are being used becomes an integral part of the activity carried out with the system. Traditional human–computer interface (HCI) theories are now inadequate for developing these context-aware applications, as we believe that the notion of context should be extended to different categories: computing contexts, user contexts, and physical contexts for ubiquitous computing. This demands a new paradigm for system requirements elicitation and design in order to make good use of such extended context information captured from mobile user behavior. Instead of redesigning or adapting existing enterprise services in an ad hoc manner, we introduce a methodology for the elicitation of context-aware adaptation requirements and the matching of context-awareness features to the target context by capability matching. For the implementation of such adaptations, we propose the use of three tiers of views: user interface views, data views, and process views. This approach centers on a novel notion of process views to ubiquitous service adaptation, where mobile users may execute a more concise version or modified procedure of the original process according to their behavior under different contexts. The process view also serves as the key mechanism for integrating user interface views and data views. Based on this model, we analyze the design and implementation issues of some common ubiquitous access situations and show how to adapt them systematically into a context-aware application by considering the requirements of a ubiquitous enterprise information system.

Architecture and Environment for Enabling Interactive Grids

Traditional use of grid computing allows a user to submit batch jobs in a grid environment. We believe, next generation grids will extend the application domain to include interactive graphical sessions. We term such grids Interactive Grids. In this paper, we describe some of the challenges involved in building Interactive Grids. These include fine grain access control, performance QoS guarantees, dynamic account management, scheduling, and user data management. We present the key architectural concepts in building Interactive Grids viz. hierarchical sessions, hierarchical admission control, hierarchical agents, classes of dynamic accounts, application profiling, user data management, scheduling for interactive sessions, persistent environment settings, and exporting remote desktop. We also describe IGENV, an environment for enabling interactive grids. IGENV consists of GISH –Grid Interactive Shell, Controlled Desktop, SAC –Session Admission Control module, GMMA –Grid Monitoring and Management Agents, and Policy Engine. We also present our testbed implementation for Interactive Grids using and extending Globus Toolkit 2.0 for the Grid middleware infrastructure, and VNC as the remote display technology.     

An incentive compatible reputation mechanism for ubiquitous computing environments

The vision of ubiquitous computing is becoming a reality thanks to the advent of portable devices and the advances in wireless networking technologies. It aims to facilitate user tasks through seamless utilization of services available in the surrounding environments. In such distributed environments featuring openness, interactions such as service provision and consumption between entities that are unknown or barely known to each other, are commonplace. Trust management through reputation mechanism for facilitating such interactions is recognized as an important element of ubiquitous computing. It is, however, faced by the problems of how to stimulate reputation information sharing and enforce honest recommendation elicitation. We present in this paper an incentive compatible reputation mechanism to facilitate the trustworthiness evaluation of entities in ubiquitous computing environments. It is based on probability theory and supports reputation evolution and propagation. Our reputation mechanism not only shows robustness against lies, but also stimulates honest and active recommendations. The latter is realized by ensuring that active and honest recommenders, compared to inactive or dishonest ones, can obtain the most number of honest (helpful) recommendations and thus suffer the least number of wrong trust decisions, as validated by simulation based evaluation. The proposed reputation mechanism is also implemented as part of a QoS-aware Web service discovery middleware and evaluated regarding its overhead on service discovery latency.     

A robotic service framework supporting automated integration of ubiquitous sensors and devices

In recent years, due to the emergence of ubiquitous computing technology, a new class of networked robots called ubiquitous robots has been introduced. The Ubiquitous Robotic Companion (URC) is our conceptual vision of ubiquitous service robots that provides its user with the services the user needs, anytime and anywhere, in the ubiquitous computing environments. There are requirements to be met for the vision of URC. One of the essential requirements is that the robotic systems must support ubiquity of services. This means that a robot service must always be available even though there are changes in the service environment. More specifically, a robotic system needs to be interoperable with sensors and devices in its current service environments automatically, rather than statically pre-programmed for its environment. In this paper, the design and implementation of an infrastructure for URC called Ubiquitous Robotic Service Framework (URSF) is presented. URSF enables automated integration of networked robots in a ubiquitous computing environment by the use of Semantic Web Services Technologies.