Personal mobile services

Ubiquitous information access through mobile devices has become a typical practice in everyday life. The mobile service paradigm shifts the role of mobile devices from consumers to providers, opening up new opportunities for a multitude of collaborative services and applications ranging from sharing personal information to collaborative participatory sensing. Although many basic principles of the standard Web service approach continue to apply, the inherent constraints of mobile devices and broadband wireless access render the deployment of the standard architecture in mobile environments inefficient. This paper introduced personal services, a user-centric paradigm that enables service-oriented interactions among mobile devices that are controlled via user-specified authorization policies. Personal services exploit the user’s contact list (ranging from phonebook to social lists) in order to publish and discover Web services while placing users in full control of their own personal data and privacy. Experimental validation demonstrates the ability of personal services to foster a new generation of collaborative mobile services. Performance evaluation results show that the publication and discovery through contact lists are efficient and that service announcements and discovery requests can reach a huge number of users in a few seconds. Results also support a conclusion that resources-constrained devices can collaborate to carry out functionalities beyond the ability of their resources limitations.     

DaaS: Cloud-based mobile Web service discovery

The proliferation of smartphones and the recent advancement in ubiquitous wireless access have made mobile Web services more possible than ever before. However, finding relevant Web services that can match requests and fit user context remains a major concern. The challenges facing Web service discovery are further magnified by the stringent constraints of mobile devices and the inherit complexity of wireless heterogeneous networks. Cloud computing, with its flexible design and theoretically unlimited computing resources, is a viable approach to bootstrapping Web service discovery. The cloud can build bridges between mobile devices, as a convenient ubiquitous interface, and a backbone infrastructure with abundant computing resources. This paper introduces “Discovery as a service (Daas)”, a novel cloud-based discovery framework that addresses the core components of mobile Web service discovery. The DaaS framework lays the foundation of efficient mobile Web service discovery that takes into consideration user preferences and context. The experimental validation and performance evaluation demonstrate that DaaS can effectively rank relevant services according to the various user context and preferences, in addition to enhancing the precision of the discovered services. The prototype also shows that Web service clustering for discovery significantly improves the overall response time, while the cloud maintains scalability according to prespecified performance criteria.     

Online role mining for context-aware mobile service recommendation

Finding and recommending suitable services for mobile devices are increasingly important due to the popularity of mobile Internet. While recent research has attempted to use role-based approaches to recommend services, role discovery is still an ongoing research topic. Using role-based approaches, popular mobile services can be recommended to other members in the same role group in a context- dependent manner. This paper proposes several role mining algorithms, to suit different application requirements, that automatically group users according to their interests and habits dynamically. Most importantly, we propose an online role mining algorithm that can discover role patterns efficiently and incrementally. Finally, we present a complete, question-based framework that can efficiently perform role mining for context-aware service recommendation in a mobile environment—where a device may not be always connected to the server and/or scalability of the role mining algorithm running on the server is critical.     

服务发现机制的研究

随着连入网络中的各种设备特别是移动无线设备的增多，有必要在网络中实现一种叫做服务发现的机制使得客户能够动态地，自动地发现其所需的服务并该问它，该文概括了服务发现的主要问题及一般要求，根据服务的组织和发布方式介绍了服务发现机制的4种主要模式，并对比分析了当前较有影响的几种协议和方案，最后，讨论了仍然有待解决的一些问题。     

A Survey of Service Discovery Protocols in Multihop Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

An in-depth review of service discovery protocols (SDPs) in multihop mobile ad hoc networks analyzes SDP building blocks and determines SDP suitability based on architecture, mobility, and network size. Mobile ad hoc networks (manets) include a variety of devices, such as cell phones, PDAs, laptops, and other relatively larger devices. These devices can move at high or low speeds or even remain stationary, entering and leaving the system when switched on or off. Such a variety of devices also offers a variety of services. A service is any tangible or intangible facility a device provides that can be useful for any other device. Services comprise those for software and hardware. A software service, for example, can be a simple file, such as an MP3 file, or a software implementation of an algorithm, such as converting one audio file format to another. A hardware service, for example, can be a printer that a mobile device can use wirelessly. To benefit from these services, a device must be able to both locate them in the network and invoke them. Service discovery protocols (SDPs) enable these capabilities.     

Jini home networking: a step toward pervasive computing

Jini connection technology forms a network of devices on the fly, without manual connection or configuration. It can also complement other technologies that strive for "anytime, anywhere" connectivity. The article looks at lookup and discovery services; reliability and scalability; Jini architectural requirements; service for non-Jini devices; Jini mobile edition for wireless devices; Jini implementations; and competing and related technologies.     

CASD: Management of a context-aware service directory

Traditional web service discovery is strongly related to the use of service directories. Especially in the case of mobile web services, where both service requestors and providers are mobile, the dynamics impose the need for directory-based discovery. Context plays an eminent role with mobility, as a filtering mechanism that enhances service discovery through the selection of the most appropriate service. However, current service directory specifications do not focus on mobility of services or context-awareness. In this paper, we propose CASD, a context-aware service directory, envisioned as a context-based index for services on top of any traditional service directory, and design algorithms for construction, search, update and merge of such directories. Furthermore, we describe the architecture of our system for context-aware service discovery, we present a prototype implementation and discuss the experimental results as well as the overall evaluation. The contribution of this work is the proposal for a novel, enhanced representation model for a context-aware service directory.     

A telematics service discovery platform using the distributed peer‐to‐peer networking system

In this paper, a distributed telematics peer‐to‐peer networking system is proposed to provide an efficient and feasible service discovery mechanism for mobile users. When mobile users travel on the road, they may request for some services from service providers to meet their demands. Mobile users in vehicles are assumed to go through a lot of regions, in which each region is associated with a region server. Related information of all service providers in a region is stored in its region server, and each region server is in charge of the service discovery requests from all vehicles located in its region. This paper focuses on the issues of developing a distributed peer‐to‐peer telematics service discovery networking system over the vehicular network environment for mobile users. To provide the communication mechanism for telematics service discovery among region server, mobile users, and service providers, the Telematics Service Markup Language is proposed. According to clients' demands, three types of query scenarios are proposed, which are (1) reference point based query, (2) continual query, and (3) route‐based query. Finally, we present usage examples and system implementation of distributed telematics peer‐to‐peer. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

移动计算环境下的个人化服务发布和组装

随着移动计算技术的发展,移动设备用户可以服务的方式共享移动设备及其周围设备的计算能力和计算资源.然而,移动设备的私有性、资源受限性以及移动性等特征使得这种基于移动设备提供的个人化服务在发布和组装方面存在着一些特殊问题,例如用户隐私、移动设备资源消耗、网络环境变化引起的失效问题等.针对以上这些问题,提出一种移动计算环境下的个人化服务发布和组装方法.该方法在个人化服务发布过程中引入了服务意愿的概念,并在服务选择过程中综合考虑了服务意愿和服务效用.此外,还提出了资源感知的心跳机制来定期更新服务选择所依赖的设备及服务状态信息,从而解决由于网络环境变化等引起的服务失效问题.基于该方法,提出了一个基于JADE和OSGi的实现框架.通过一个案例分析,验证了所提出的实现框架的有效性以及在移动计算环境下考虑服务意愿的合理性.     

Context-based caching and routing for P2P web service discovery

In modern heterogeneous environments, such as mobile, pervasive and ad-hoc networks, architectures based on web services offer an attractive solution for effective communication and inter-operation. In such dynamic and rapidly evolving environments, efficient web service discovery is an important task. Usually this task is based on the input/output parameters or other functional attributes, however this does not guarantee the validity or successful utilization of retrieved web services. Instead, non-functional attributes, such as device power features, computational resources and connectivity status, that characterize the context of both service providers and consumers play an important role to the quality and usability of discovery results. In this paper we introduce context-awareness in web service discovery, enabling the provision of the most appropriate services at the right location and time. We focus on context-based caching and routing for improving web service discovery in a mobile peer-to-peer environment. We conducted a thorough experimental study, using our prototype implementation based on the JXTA framework, while simulations are employed for testing the scalability of the approach. We illustrate the advantages that this approach offers, both by evaluating the context-based cache performance and by comparing the efficiency of location-based routing to broadcast-based approaches. Recommended by: Zakaria Maamar     

Wukong: A cloud-oriented file service for mobile Internet devices

Along with the rapid growth of heterogeneous cloud services and network technologies, an increasing number of mobile devices use cloud storage services to enlarge their capacity and share data in our daily lives. We commonly use cloud service client-side software in a straightforward fashion. However, when more devices and users participate in heterogeneous services, the difficulty of managing these services efficiently and conveniently increases. In this paper, we report a novel cloud-oriented file service, Wukong, which provides a user-friendly and highly available facilitative data access method for mobile devices in cloud settings. Wukong supports mobile applications, which may access local files only, transparently accessing cloud services with a relatively high performance. To the best of our knowledge, Wukong is the first file service that supports heterogeneous cloud services for mobile devices by using the innovative storage abstraction layer. We have implemented a prototype with several plugins and evaluated it in a systematic way. We find that this easily operable file service has a high usability and extensibility. It costs about 50 to 150 lines of code to implement a new backend service support plugin. Wukong achieves an acceptable throughput of 179.11 kB/s in an ADSL environment and 80.68 kB/s under a countryside EVDO 3G network with negligible overhead.     

物联网服务发现初探:传统SOA的可行性和局限性

基于SOA(service-oriented architecture)的物联网(Internet of things,IoT)把设备的功能服务化,以一种统一和通用的接口向外界提供服务。由于物联网中设备的海量性、移动性和资源高度受限性,以及无线网络自身的不可靠性,设备服务与传统的Web服务相比具有不同的特点,现有的Web服务发现方法不能有效地满足物联网中服务发现的需求。从Web服务发现体系结构和匹配策略两个方面对典型的Web服务发现方法进行了分析;结合物联网中服务提供的特点,从可扩展性、资源有限性、异构性和环境的动态变化性四个方面,分析了将Web服务发现方法应用于物联网服务提供中所面临的问题,并讨论了可能的解决思路;探讨了物联网中服务发现需要解决的问题。     

A System Architecture for Context-Aware Service Discovery

Recent technological advances have enabled both the consumption and provision of mobile services (m-services) by small, portable, handheld devices. However, mobile devices still have restricted capabilities with respect to processing, storage space, energy consumption, stable connectivity, bandwidth availability. In order to address these shortcomings, a potential solution is context-awareness (by context we refer to the implicit information related both to the requesting user and service provider that can affect the usefulness of the returned results). Context plays the role of a filtering mechanism, allowing only transmission of relevant data and services back to the device, thus saving bandwidth and reducing processing costs. In this paper, we present an architecture for context-aware service discovery. We describe in detail the system implementation and we present the system evaluation as a tradeoff between a) the increase of the quality of service discovery when context-awareness is taken into account and b) the extra cost/burden imposed by context management.     

Zero Configuration Networking: Implementation, performance, and security

The ubiquitous access to wired and wireless networks is making information access possible from anywhere, anytime, and any device. Today, end-users are also highly mobile, often equipped with a range of portable devices, and they expect service availability when they require it. In addition, they do not want to be burdened by complex configurations before they can discover and use services. The Zero Configuration (Zeroconf) Networking technology promises to alleviate this configuration burden by allowing users to discover services and devices with little end-user intervention. We compare two popular implementations of Zeroconf namely, Avahi and Mono.Zeroconf running on Linux and Windows XP operating systems, respectively. We evaluate their performance using service discovery time as the performance metric. Our empirical results show that Linux Avahi yields almost 99% improvements in service discovery time over Windows Mono.Zeroconf. We also discuss security solutions that can be deployed to enhance the security of Zeroconf networks. We further investigate the performance of the IP Security (IPSec) protocol when used by our Mono.Zeroconf implementation running on the Windows XP platform. With IPSec, service discovery time increases by almost 45% with our prototype implementation.     

Efficient data-forwarding method in delay-tolerant P2P networking for IoT services

These days Internet of Things (IoT), which consists of smart objects such as sensor nodes is the most important technology for providing intelligent services. In the IoT ecosystem, wireless sensor networks deliver collected information from IoT devices to a server via sink nodes, and IoT services are provided by peer-to-peer (P2P) networking between the server and the IoT devices. Particularly, IoT applications with wide service area requires the mobile sink nodes to cover the service area. To employ mobile sink nodes, the network adopts delay-tolerant capability by which delay-tolerant nodes try to transmit data when they connect to the mobile sink node in the application service field. However, if the connection status between a IoT device and a mobile sink node is not good, the efficiency of data forwarding will be decreased. In addition, retransmission in bad connection cause high energy consumption for data transmission. Therefore, data forwarding in the delay-tolerant based services needs to take the connection status into account. The proposed method predicts the connection status using naïve Bayesian classifier and determines whether the delay tolerant node transmits data to the mobile sink node or not. Furthermore, the efficiency of the proposed method was validated through extensive computer simulations.     

MicroMAIS: executing and orchestrating Web services on constrained mobile devices

Mobile devices with their more and more powerful resources allow the development of mobile information systems in which services are not only provided by traditional systems but also autonomously executed and controlled in the mobile devices themselves. Services distributed on autonomous mobile devices allow both the development of cooperative applications without a back‐end infrastructure and the development of applications blending distributed and centralized services. In this paper, we propose MicroMAIS: an integrated platform for supporting the execution of Web service‐based applications natively on a mobile device. The MicroMAIS platform is composed of mAS and μ‐BPEL. The former allows the execution of a single Web service, whereas the latter permits the orchestration of several Web services according to the WS‐BPEL standard. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.