Assessing Level of Ubiquitous Computing Services for Ubiquitous Business Design

We are entering into a new era of enterprise computing that is characterized by an emphasis on broadband convergence, knowledge sharing, and calm services. Some people refer to this as the "ubiquitous network" business model because its focus is on a high degree of connectivity between a company and its customers, suppliers, and channel partners. Moreover, immediate access to ideas, goods, and services will be of greater value than the traditional model of permanent and ponderous possession. This paper illustrates how ubiquitous computing technology can be combined with legacy computer-based information systems, along with thoughts on relevant issues of ubiquitous commerce. We also propose a model for how to assess levels of ubiquitous computing services.     

Strategic Implications for E-Business Organizations in the Ubiquitous Computing Economy

The ubiquitous economy brings both pros and cons for the organizations. The third space emerged by the development of ubiquitous computing generates new concept of community. The community is tightly coupled with people, products, and systems. Organizational strategies need to be reshaped for the changing environment in the third space and community. Organizational structure also needs to change for community serving organization. Community serving concept equipped with the standardized technology will be essential. One of the key technologies, RFID service will play a key role to acknowledge identification and services required. When the needs for sensing the environment increase, technological requirement such as the ubiquitous sensor network (USN) will be critically needed..     

面向普适计算的虚拟现实在智能家居中的应用

随着面向普适计算的虚拟现实（U-VR）和无线传感器网络等相关技术的发展,面向应用的智能家居系统的研究逐渐成为关注的热点。本文在此背景下,提出一种基于传感器网络,面向普适计算的虚拟现实在智能家居中的应用方案,并从系统架构、整体设计、硬件设计及软件设计等方面详细阐述了其设计流程。最后给出两个应用场景测试平台,验证了其有效性、实用性和先进性。     

Centaurus: An Infrastructure for Service Management in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

In the near future, we will see dramatic changes in computing and networking hardware. A large number of devices (e.g., phones, PDAs, even small household appliances) will become computationally enabled. Micro/nano sensors will be widely embedded in most engineered artifacts, from the clothes we wear to the roads we drive on. All of these devices will be (wirelessly) networked using Bluetooth, IEEE 802.15 or IEEE 802.11 for short range connectivity creating pervasive environments. In this age where a large number of wirelessly networked appliances and devices are becoming commonplace, there is a necessity for providing a standard interface to them that is easily accessible by any user. This paper outlines the design of Centaurus, an infrastructure for presenting services to heterogeneous mobile clients in a physical space via some short range wireless links. The infrastructure is communication medium independent; we have implemented the system over Bluetooth, CDPD and Infrared, three well-known wireless technologies. All the components in our model use a language based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) for communication, giving the system a uniform and easily adaptable interface. Centaurus defines a uniform infrastructure for heterogeneous services, both hardware and software, to be made available to diverse mobile users within a confined space.     

Towards a Ubiquitous Robotic Companion: Design and Implementation of Ubiquitous Robotic Service Framework

In recent years, motivated by the emergence of ubiquitous computing technologies, a new class of networked robots, ubiquitous robots, has been introduced. The Ubiquitous Robotic Companion (URC) is our conceptual vision of ubiquitous service robots that provide users with the services they need, anytime and anywhere in ubiquitous computing environments. To realize the vision of URC, one of the essential requirements for robotic systems is to support ubiquity of services: that is, a robot service must be always available even though there are changes in the service environments. Specifically robotic systems need to be automatically interoperable with sensors and devices in current service environments, rather than statically preprogrammed for them. In this paper, the design and implementation of a semantic‐based ubiquitous robotic space (SemanticURS) is presented. SemanticURS enables automated integration of networked robots into ubiquitous computing environments exploiting Semantic Web Services and AI‐based planning technologies.     

普适环境中的动态更新模型

致力于普适计算下的动态更新的研究,首先分析了普适计算下动态更新的场景,针对普适环境的动态性,我们提出了区别于传统更新方式的路径更新;通过分析集中式更新模型的局限性,提出了适合普适环境的分布式更新模型;最后使用类型与效果系统为更新模型做形式化分析.     

UbiqMuseum: A Bluetooth and Java Based Context-Aware System for Ubiquitous Computing

This paper evaluates the use of Bluetooth and Java based technologies in ubiquitous computing environments. Ubiquitous computing strongly depends on leveraging appropriate contextual information to users, according to their preferences and the environment in which they reside. We present UbiqMuseum – an experimental context-aware application that provides context-aware information to museum visitors. UbiqMuseum combines the productivity of Java with the universal connectivity provided by Bluetooth wireless technology. We describe the overall architecture and discuss the implementation steps taken to create our Bluetooth and Java based context-aware application. We demonstrate practicality of building a context-aware system by using UbiqMuseum as a proof of concept that integrates a combination of Bluetooth, WLAN and Ethernet LAN technologies. Finally we run some experiments in a small testbed to evaluate the performance and system behaviour. We evaluate the impact on throughput with varying packet size, coding types and device separation distance sending both images and text. We also present our findings in term of inquiry delay with respect to distance. Numerical results show that Bluetooth offers a relatively steady throughput up to 10 m while the inquiry delay does not increase significantly with distance. Juan-Carlos Cano is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) in Spain. He earned an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in computer science from the UPV in 1994 and 2002 respectively. Between 1995–1997 he worked as a programming analyst at IBM's manufacturing division in Valencia. His current research interests include power aware routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks and pervasive computing. You can contact him at jucano@disca.upv.es. Pietro Manzoni received the MS degree in computer science from the “Universitá degli Studi" of Milan, Italy, in 1989, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy, in 1995. He is an associate professor of computer science at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain. His research activity is related to wireless networks protocol design, modeling, and implementation. He is member of the IEEE. C.-K. Toh is currently a Professor and Chair in Communication Networks at Queen Mary University of London, UK. He is also the Director of the UK Ad Hoc Wireless Consortium and Director of the Queen Mary/Fudan Joint Research Lab in Mobile Networking and Ubiquitous Computing. Concurrently, he is also an Honorary Professor with the University of Hong Kong and an Adjunct Professor at Fudan University, Shanghai. Previously, he was the Director of Research with TRW Tactical Systems in California, USA (now Northrop Grumman Corporation) and was responsible for DARPA and Army programs in communications and networking. He had also worked for Hughes Research, ALR, HP, and was a professor at GeorgiaTech and University of California, Irvine. CK is the recipient of the 2005 IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Technical Medal Award, for “pioneering contributions to communication protocols in ad hoc mobile wireless networks." He is the author of “Wireless ATM & Ad Hoc Networks" (Kluwer Press, 1996) and “Ad Hoc Mobile Wireless Networks" (Prentice Hall Engineering Title Best Seller, 2001–2003). He is a recipient of the ACM Recognition of Service Award, for co-founding ACM MobiHoc Conference. He is a co-recipient of the Korean Science & Engineering Foundation Best Journal paper Award for his work on ad hoc TCP. CK was formerly the Chairman of IEEE Communications Society Technical Committee on Computer Communications and Chairman of IEEE Subcommittee on Ad Hoc Mobile Wireless Networks. He was an IEEE Expert/Distinguished Lecturer and had served as a Steering Committee Member for IEEE WCNC Conference and IEEE Transaction on Mobile Computing. He was a member of IEEE Communications Society Meetings & Conferences Board. CK was an editor for IEEE Networks, IEEE JSAC, IEEE transactions on Wireless Communications, Journal on Communication Networks, and IEEE Distributed Systems. He is a Fellow of four societies: British Computer Society, the IEE, the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers and the New Zealand Computer Society. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Cambridge University, England, and his executive education from Harvard.     

A Semantic Service Discovery Network for Large‐Scale Ubiquitous Computing Environments

This paper presents an efficient semantic service discovery scheme called UbiSearch for a large‐scale ubiquitous computing environment. A semantic service discovery network in the semantic vector space is proposed where services that are semantically close to each other are mapped to nearby positions so that the similar services are registered in a cluster of resolvers. Using this mapping technique, the search space for a query is efficiently confined within a minimized cluster region while maintaining high accuracy in comparison to the centralized scheme. The proposed semantic service discovery network provides a number of novel features to evenly distribute service indexes to the resolvers and reduce the number of resolvers to visit. Our simulation study shows that UbiSearch provides good semantic searchability as compared to the centralized indexing system. At the same time, it supports scalable semantic queries with low communication overhead, balanced load distribution among resolvers for service registration and query processing, and personalized semantic matching.     

Context‐Aware Active Services in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

With the advent of ubiquitous computing environments, it has become increasingly important for applications to take full advantage of contextual information, such as the user's location, to offer greater services to the user without any explicit requests. In this paper, we propose context‐aware active services based on context‐aware middleware for URC systems (CAMUS). The CAMUS is a middleware that provides context‐aware applications with a development and execution methodology. Accordingly, the applications based on CAMUS respond in a timely fashion to contextual information. This paper presents the system architecture of CAMUS and illustrates the content recommendation and control service agents with the properties, operations, and tasks for context‐aware active services. To evaluate CAMUS, we apply the proposed active services to a TV application domain. We implement and experiment with a TV content recommendation service agent, a control service agent, and TV tasks based on CAMUS. The implemented content recommendation service agent divides the user's preferences into common and specific models to apply other recommendations and applications easily, including the TV content recommendations.     

Supporting Service Discovery,Querying and Interaction in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

In this paper, we contend that ubiquitous computing environments will be highly heterogeneous, service rich domains. Moreover, future applications will consequently be required to interact with multiple, specialised service location and interaction protocols simultaneously. We argue that existing service discovery techniques do not provide sufficient support to address the challenges of building applications targeted to these emerging environments.This paper makes a number of contributions. Firstly, using a set of short ubiquitous computing scenarios we identify several key limitations of existing service discovery approaches that reduce their ability to support ubiquitous computing applications. Secondly, we present a detailed analysis of requirements for providing effective support in this domain. Thirdly, we provide the design of a simple extensible meta-service discovery architecture that uses database techniques to unify service discovery protocols and addresses several of our key requirements. Lastly, we examine the lessons learnt through the development of a prototype implementation of our architecture.     

分布式计算模型的分析和比较

分布式计算是近年提出的一种新的计算技术,针对当前几种主流的分布式计算技术,如Web Services,中间件、网格等进行了分析和比较,尽管各种分布式计算技术在理念、规范、应用和实现等方面有较大的差异,但每一种技术都得到了一定程度的发展和应用,解决了特定范围内的分布式计算问题。所以,多种计算技术的综合研究,不仅是分布式未来研究的方向,也是分布式计算技术发展的关键。     

泛在网络中基于标签标识的应用与业务需求

介绍了泛在网络中基于标签标识的应用和业务的概念、组成要素、应用场景分类，并对相关业务和能力需求进行了分析和探讨。     

云计算在智能电网中的应用及其安全问题研究

文章认为在智能电网中引入云计算,构建智能电网云可以为智能电网的发展提供有效支持。基于智能电网的特征,依托作为一种崭新的存储和计算模式的云计算技术,文章阐述了云计算技术如何为智能电网的数据存储和分析提供技术支持,设计了一种智能电网云计算的结构,分析了云计算技术给智能电网带来的诸多益处;并就智能电网云可能存在的安全威胁和相应的防范措施进行讨论。     

普适计算中定位服务的参考点选择及误差分析

通过分析多边定位法在未知节点的定位过程中产生的定位误差,提出并证明了有关定位参考点布置的三个定理,使在普适计算环境中可通过有针对性地布置参考点的位置来减小未知节点的定位误差.在此基础上提出定位参考点选择算法,该算法以参考点间的位置关系为基础,通过选择合适的参考点对未知节点进行定位.仿真实验结果表明所提出的定位参考点布置定理及选择算法能满足普适计算环境中移动对象实时定位的需求,并具有较高的定位精度.     

普适计算中定位服务的参考点布置及选择算法

如何准确地获得未知移动节点的位置信息是普适计算环境下定位服务要解决的关键问题.本文通过分析多边形定位法在定位过程中产生的定位误差,将混沌动力学的三大特性很好地运用到参考点的摆放问题上,提出并证明了定位参考点布置的三个定理.在此基础上,对传统多边形定位算法进行了改进,提出了定位参考点选择算法.仿真实验表明本文所提出的参考点布置定理及定位参考点选择算法能更好地满足对普适终端实时定位的需求,且具有较高的定位精度.     

Trust for Ubiquitous,Transparent Collaboration

In this paper, trust-based recommendations control the exchange of personal information between handheld computers. Combined with explicit risk analysis, this enables unobtrusive information exchange, while limiting access to confidential information. The same model can be applied to a wide range of mobile computing tasks, such as managing personal address books and electronic diaries, to automatically provide an appropriate level of security. Recommendations add structure to the information, by associating categories with data and with each other, with degrees of trust belief and disbelief. Since categories also in turn confer privileges and restrict actions, they are analogous to rôles in a Rôle-Based Access Control system, while principals represent their trust policies in recommendations. Participants first compute their trust in information, by combining their own trust assumptions with others' policies. Recommendations are thus linked together to compute a considered, local trust assessment. Actions are then moderated by a risk assessment, which weighs up costs and benefits, including the cost of the user's time, before deciding whether to allow or forbid the information exchange, or ask for help. By unifying trust assessments and access control, participants can take calculated risks to automatically yet safely share their personal information.     

A Strategic Grid for Implementing Ubiquitous Computing

This letter offers a general framework representing the most effective strategies for implementing ubiquitous computing, given different levels of organizational information system capacity and business needs. The strategic grid offered here identifies promising movements which may potentially have a significant effect on the future development of ubiquitous computing.     

An RFID-enabled middleware architecture for urban gaming

Due to the rapid acceptance of mobile devices and localisation technologies like global positioning system (GPS) in every day life, the fascination in utilising such technologies for entertainment is also increasing. The concept of urban gaming employs localisation technology to incorporate player's position into the game concept, generating a truly pervasive game experience. Urban gaming has immense potential and is often cited by denizens as the next gaming behemoth, however it is somewhat hampered by the existing technologies that it employs. GPS is the more commonly used technology in this genre; however it displays some serious limitations, especially in urban areas. This research investigates the feasibility of incorporating radio frequency identification (RFID) as an alternate technology in location-based urban gaming. RFID is an emerging and increasingly popular technology, whose versatile capabilities offer a wide range of possible uses. This article documents a middleware RFID-enabled location-based gaming prototype.     

Evaluating Bluetooth Performance as the Support for Context-Aware Applications

We present an experiment relative to the use of the Bluetooth wireless technology to provide network support for context-aware applications. We describe an approach to provide network interconnection using a combination of wireless and wired network technologies. We also describe the steps taken to create a Bluetooth based context-aware application. We, finally, evaluate, using a small test-bed and simulation the overall performance of this technology when adopted in the area of context-aware and ubiquitous computing.     

People,Places, Things: Web Presence for the Real World

The convergence of Web technology, wireless networks, and portable client devices provides new design opportunities for computer/communications systems. In the HP Labs' Cooltown project we have been exploring these opportunities through an infrastructure to support web presence for people, places and things. We put web servers into things like printers and put information into web servers about things like artwork; we group physically related things into places embodied in web servers. Using URLs for addressing, physical URL beaconing and sensing of URLs for discovery, and localized web servers for directories, we can create a location-aware but ubiquitous system to support nomadic users. On top of this infrastructure we can leverage Internet connectivity to support communications services. Web presence bridges the World Wide Web and the physical world we inhabit, providing a model for supporting nomadic users without a central control point.