Towards machine-learning-driven effective mashup recommendations from big data in mobile networks and the Internet-of-Things

A large number of Web APIs have been released as services in mobile communications, but the service provided by a single Web API is usually limited. To enrich the services in mobile communications, developers have combined Web APIs and developed a new service, which is known as a mashup. The emergence of mashups greatly increases the number of services in mobile communications, especially in mobile networks and the Internet-of-Things (IoT), and has encouraged companies and individuals to develop even more mashups, which has led to the dramatic increase in the number of mashups. Such a trend brings with it big data, such as the massive text data from the mashups themselves and continually-generated usage data. Thus, the question of how to determine the most suitable mashups from big data has become a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a mashup recommendation framework from big data in mobile networks and the IoT. The proposed framework is driven by machine learning techniques, including neural embedding, clustering, and matrix factorization. We employ neural embedding to learn the distributed representation of mashups and propose to use cluster analysis to learn the relationship among the mashups. We also develop a novel Joint Matrix Factorization (JMF) model to complete the mashup recommendation task, where we design a new objective function and an optimization algorithm. We then crawl through a real-world large mashup dataset and perform experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves high accuracy in mashup recommendation and performs better than all compared baselines.     

TelecomI+D02: Next Generation Mashups: How to Create my Own Services in a Convergent World

Service and content mashups are becoming more and more a mainstream of the Web. Recently, several mashup platforms have introduced the user-centric paradigm, thus allowing novice end-users to easily create, share and enjoy their own services. However, these platforms still lack the advanced features that the Mobile Internet is able to support, other than just browsing on the mobile telephone. Advanced location features and the possibility of communicating from anywhere at anytime will leverage new business models thus providing end-users with amazing new services. This paper introduces a platform that merges user-centricity and Mobile Web services with a mashup environment where users can create and share their own services, describing its main features.     

A novel data size-aware offloading technique for resource provisioning in mobile cloud computing

Mobile device users are involved in social networking, gaming, learning, and even some office work, so the end users expect mobile devices with high-response computing capacities, storage, and high battery power consumption. The data-intensive applications, such as text search, online gaming, and face recognition usage, have tremendously increased. With such high complex applications, there are many issues in mobile devices, namely, fast battery draining, limited power, low storage capacity, and increased energy consumption. The novelty of this work is to strike a balance between time and energy consumption of mobile devices while using data-intensive applications by finding the optimal offloading decisions. This paper proposes a novel efficient Data Size-Aware Offloading Model (DSAOM) for data-intensive applications and to predict the appropriate resource provider for dynamic resource allocation in mobile cloud computing. Based on the data size, the tasks are separated and gradually allocated to the appropriate resource providers for execution. The task is placed into the appropriate resource provider by considering the availability services in the fog nodes or the cloud. The tasks are split into smaller portions for execution in the neighbor fog nodes. To execute the task in the remote side, the offloading decision is made by using the min-cut algorithm by considering the monetary cost of the mobile device. This proposed system achieves low-latency time 13.2% and low response time 14.1% and minimizes 24% of the energy consumption over the existing model. Finally, according to experimental findings, this framework efficiently lowers energy use and improves performance for data-intensive demanding application activities, and the task offloading strategy is effective for intensive offloading requests.     

移动互联网业务发展探讨

文章针对移动互联网典型业务、关键技术、运营模式等热点问题进行了讨论,认为未来3G网络能力的提升,使得移动互联网不再是简单的＂移动网＋互联网＂,将对传统互联网的业务模式带来巨大改变;Mashup、移动Widgets等技术的发展可以为用户提供更加优质的服务,提供新的商务模式,为包括运营商、设备提供商、内容/服务提供商（CP/SP）、互联网应用提供商等相关参与方带来收益;移动网络与互联网之间既存在内容与服务层面的竞争,也存在相互的合作,移动互联网业务创新中应突出移动应用特色,避免与传统互联网业务同质化。     

移动互联网业务对基站能耗的影响

快速发展的移动互联网业务,为运营商带来了诸多挑战,业务特性与网络能耗之间的映射关系尚属空白。为了准确评估业务对网络资源的影响以及网络设备由此产生的能耗,深入物理层资源粒度,提出一种改进的“二次线性映射”模型及四步建模思路,同时选取了11种典型业务场景,定量评估数据、信令分别消耗的网络资源和能耗大小,便于业务能耗的精细化管理和运营管控,为降低端到端资源开销和业务能耗打下基础。     

Modeap: Moving Desktop Application to Mobile Cloud Service

Thanks to the availability of various mobile applications, lots of users shift from desktop environments, e.g., PCs and laptops, to mobile devices, e.g., smartphones and tablets. However, there are still some desktop applications without counterparts on mobile devices, such as some integrated development environments (e.g., eclipse) and automatic industry control systems. In this paper, we propose Modeap, a platform-independent mobile cloud service that can push all desktop applications developed for various operating systems from cloud servers to mobile devices. Modeap follows a design principle of complete detachment and regeneration of desktop user interface, i.e., the essential graphical primitives of the original desktop applications will be intercepted and then translated into standard web-based graphical primitives such that the interactions between users and remote cloud applications become possible via mobile web browsers. In this way, all desktop applications built upon the same set of graphical primitives can be used on mobile devices in great flexibility without installing any new software. We have developed a proof-of-concept prototype that provides Windows applications from cloud server to mobile web browsers. The results of extensive experiments show that the proposed framework can achieve our design goals with low latency and bandwidth consumption.     

Wireless network resource management for Web-based multimedia document services

Advances in wireless technology and availability of portable devices with networking capabilities have enabled ubiquitous Web accessibility. This has created the need to provide advance Internet services to mobile users without causing service failures due to connection migration or handoffs. However, scarcity of wireless resources restricts the provision of multimedia services in wireless networks. We address the issue of managing wireless resources to support Web-based multimedia document services including MPEG-4-based applications, in wireless networks with a high degree of user mobility. In particular, we formulate the resource management problem in wireless networks as an optimization problem with an objective function comprising different quality of presentation parameters.     

Energy efficiency of mobile handsets: Measuring user attitudes and behavior

The purpose of this research is to understand the behavior and expectations of mobile handset users towards energy consumption. We analyze mobile handset monitoring traces from subsequent years with N = 253 and 105, and questionnaire studies with N = 155 and 150. The data allows us to study both the actual behavior of the users and their explicit attitudes, expectations, and experiences. Additional difference to prior work is the use of longitudinal data from multiple years and a user sample that is much larger than in earlier studies. We present hypotheses drawn both from literature and from our own experience, and use the datasets to support or refute them. Our results indicate that mobile device users need more detailed and clearer information of the battery status and energy consumption. Moreover, users want to understand how different applications and services affect the energy consumption and to learn what they can do to control it.     

Ubiquitous use of mobile social network services

Smartphones are becoming increasingly penetrated among people. Social networking is one of the most popular applications that are being widely used through smartphones. The current research aims to understand Chinese users’ behaviour and identifies factors that impact intentions toward the usage of the social network services via handheld devices. By making use of Structural Equation Modelling technique based on a sample of 297 respondents, the research findings show that, technology acceptance model and its variants can only be used as an instrument to understand users’ adoption behaviour. The research findings reveal that mobility in concert with perceived ease of use, use context, and critical mass in concert with social influence impact users’ behavioural intention and usage significantly. Moreover, habitual behaviour of users plays a particularly important role toward the use of mobile social network services.     

Mobile banking adoption: A literature review

Electronic commerce (e-commerce) continues to have a profound impact on the global business environment, but technologies and applications also have begun to focus more on mobile computing, the wireless Web, and mobile commerce. Against this backdrop, mobile banking (m-banking) has emerged as an important distribution channel, with considerable research devoted to its adoption. However, this research stream has lacked a clear roadmap or agenda. Therefore, the present article analyzes and synthesizes existing studies of m-banking adoption and maps the major theories that researchers have used to predict consumer intentions to adopt it. The findings indicate that the m-banking adoption literature is fragmented, though it commonly relies on the technology acceptance model and its modifications, revealing that compatibility (with lifestyle and device), perceived usefulness, and attitude are the most significant drivers of intentions to adopt m-banking services in developed and developing countries. Moreover, the extant literature appears limited by its narrow focus on SMS banking in developing countries; virtually no studies address the use of m-banking applications via smartphones or tablets or consider the consequences of such usage. This study makes several recommendations for continued research in the area of mobile banking.     

Layer 1 virtual private network management by users

The layer 1 virtual private network (LlVPN) technology supports multiple user networks over a common carrier transport network. Emerging L1VPN services allow: L1VPNs to be built over multiple carrier networks; L1VPNs to lease or trade resources with each other; and users to reconfigure an L1VPN topology, and add or remove bandwidth. The trend is to offer increased flexibility and provide management functions as close to users as possible, while maintaining proper resource access right control. In this article two aspects of the L1VPN service and management architectures are discussed: management of carrier network partitions for L1VPNs, and L1VPN management by users. We present the carrier network partitioning at the network element (NE) and L1VPN levels. As an example, a transaction language one (TL1) proxy is developed to achieve carrier network partitioning at the NE level. The TL1 proxy is implemented without any modifications to the existing NE management system. On top of the TL1 proxy, a Web services (WS)-based L1VPN management tool is implemented. Carriers use the tool to partition resources at the L1VPN level by assigning resources, together with the WS-based management services for the resources, to L1VPNs. L1VPN administrators use the tool to receive resource partitions from multiple carriers and partner L1VPNs. Further resource partitioning or regrouping can be conducted on the received resources, and leasing or trading resources with partner LlVPNs is supported. These services offer a potential business model for a physical network broker. After the L1VPN administrators compose the use scenarios of resources, and make the use scenarios available to the L1VPN end users as WS, the end users reconfigure the L1VPN without intervention from the administrator. The tool accomplishes LlVPN management by users     

Novel service protocol for supporting remote and mobile users in wireless sensor networks with multiple static sinks

A wireless sensor network typically consists of users, a sink, and a number of sensor nodes. The users may be remotely connected to a wireless sensor network and via legacy networks such as Internet or Satellite the remote users obtain data collected by the sink that is statically located at a border of the wireless sensor network. However, in practical sensor network applications, there might be two types of users: the traditional remote users and mobile users such as firefighters and soldiers. The mobile users may move around sensor fields and they communicate with the static sink only via the wireless sensor networks in order to obtain data like location information of victims in disaster areas. For supporting the mobile users, existing studies consider temporary structures. However, the temporary structures are constructed per each mobile user or each source nodes so that it causes large energy consumption of sensor nodes. Moreover, since some of them establish the source-based structure, sinks in them cannot gather collective information like mean temperature and object detection. In this paper, to effectively support both the remote users and the mobile users, we propose a novel service protocol relying on the typical wireless sensor network. In the protocol, multiple static sinks connect with legacy networks and divide a sensor field into the number of the multiple sinks. Through sharing queries and data via the legacy networks, the multiple static sinks provide high throughput through distributed data gathering and low latency through short-hops data delivery. Multiple static sinks deliver the aggregated data to the remote users via the legacy networks. In case of the mobile users, when a mobile user moves around, it receives the aggregated data from the nearest static sink. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol is more efficient in terms of energy consumption, data delivery ratio, and delay than the existing protocols.     

Context-aware mobile image annotation for media search and sharing

In recent years, rapid advances in media technology including acquisition, processing and distribution have led to proliferation of many mobile applications. Amongst them, one of the emerging applications is mobile-based image annotation that uses camera phones to capture images with system-suggested tags before uploading them to the media sharing portals. This procedure can offer information to mobile users and also facilitate the retrieval and sharing of the image for Web users. However, context information that can be acquired from mobile devices is underutilized in many existing mobile image annotation systems. In this paper, we propose a new mobile image annotation system that utilizes content analysis, context analysis and their integration to annotate images acquired from mobile devices. Specifically, three types of context, location, user interaction and Web, are considered in the tagging processes. An image dataset of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) campus has been constructed, and a prototype mobile image tag suggestion system has been developed. The experimental results show that the proposed system performs well in both effectiveness and efficiency on NTU dataset, and shows good potential in domain-specific mobile image annotation for image sharing.     

Optimizing Web delivery over wireless links: design, implementation, and experiences

World over wide-area wireless Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) networks have been upgraded to support the general packet radio service (GPRS). GPRS brings "always-on" wireless data connectivity at bandwidths comparable to that of conventional fixed-line telephone modems. Unfortunately many users have found the reality to be rather different, experiencing very disappointing performance when, for example, browsing the Web over GPRS. In This work, we show what causes the web and its underlying transport protocol TCP to underperform in a GPRS wide-area wireless environment. We examine why certain GPRS network characteristics interact badly with TCP to yield problems such as: link underutilization for short-lived flows, excess queueing for long-lived flows, ACK compression, poor loss recovery, and gross unfairness between competing flows. We also show that many Web browsers tend to be overly aggressive, and by opening too many simultaneous TCP connections can aggravate matters. We present the design and implementation of a web optimizing proxy system called GPRSWeb that mitigates many of the GPRS link-related performance problems with a simple software update to a mobile device. The update is a link-aware middleware (a local "client proxy") that sits in the mobile device, and communicates with a "server proxy" located at the other end of the wireless link, close to the wired-wireless border. The dual-proxy architecture collectively implements a number of key enhancements-an aggressive caching scheme that employs content-based hash keying to improve hit rates for dynamic content, a preemptive push of Web page support resources to mobile clients, resource adaptation to suit client capabilities, delta encoded data transfer of modified pages, DNS lookup migration, and a UDP-based reliable transport protocol that is specifically optimized for use over GPRS. We show that these enhancements results in significant improvement in web performance over GPRS links.     

Analysis of users and non-users of smartphone applications

Purpose

Smartphones facilitate the potential adoption of new mobile applications. The purpose of this research is to study users and non-users of three selected mobile applications, and find out what really drives the intention to use these applications across users and non-users.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors measured actual usage of mobile applications in a panel study of 579 Finnish smartphone users, using in-device measurements as an objective way to identify users and non-users. A web-based survey was used in collecting data to test an extended TAM model in explaining intention to use.

Findings

Perceived technological barriers negatively affect behavioural control, reflecting people’s assessment of themselves being capable of using the services without trouble. Behavioural control is directly linked to perceived usefulness (except for games) and perceived enjoyment, as hypothesized. Perceived enjoyment and usefulness were generically found to explain intention to use applications for both users and for non-users.

Research limitations/implications

With regards to the impact of social norms, the study finds that further research needs to be done in exploring its impact more thoroughly. The dataset of the research, consisting purely of male-dominated, young smartphone users, make the generalization of results difficult.

Practical implications

There are differences regarding what drives the usage of different kinds of mobile applications. In this study, map applications and mobile Internet, are driven by more utilitarian motivations, whereas games are more hedonic. It is also clear that not everybody are using applications facilitated by smartphones, and therefore the presented approach of studying users and non-users separately provides a new approach to analyze adoption on a practical level.

Originality/value

This research proves that models like TAM should not treat mobile services as a generic concept, but instead to specifically address individual mobile services. The research also demonstrates the unique value of combining objective usage measurements (reflecting actual behaviour) with traditional survey data in more comprehensively modelling service adoption.     

Multi-way relay system with network coding in multi-spot beam satellite networks

In this paper, we consider a multi-way relay system with network coding (NC) in multi-spot beam satellite networks. In particular, we focus on multiparty video conferencing via a satellite. Our proposed protocol uses the multicasting routing information and number of video frame packets to generate coded packets. The proposed protocol ensures the reliable transmission of multicasting data for mobile users using the decoding error rate for the random linear network coding batch. To minimize the delay in the link layer, we propose a resource allocation scheme for multiparty video conferencing with NC in satellite communications. For the resource allocation, we use application information acquired by a performance enhancing proxy. The simulation results show that the achievable rate can be increased by the proposed protocol. The proposed protocol can also reduce the number of packet transmissions, resulting in the efficient usage of satellite radio resources. Furthermore, it is shown that the proposed protocol ensures the reliable transmission of multicasting data for mobile users by using resources saved by NC. The average peak signal-to-noise of the video streaming for mobile users is better than that of the conventional system. As a result, the visual quality of video streaming services is improved.     

Building Grid Portal Applications From a Web Service Component Architecture

This work describes an approach to building Grid applications based on the premise that users who wish to access and run these applications prefer to do so without becoming experts on Grid technology. We describe an application architecture based on wrapping user applications and application workflows as Web services and Web service resources. These services are visible to the users and to resource providers through a family of Grid portal components that can be used to configure, launch, and monitor complex applications in the scientific language of the end user. The applications in this model are instantiated by an application factory service. The layered design of the architecture makes it possible for an expert to configure an application factory service with a custom user interface client that may be dynamically loaded into the portal.     

Expanse software for distributed call and connection control

The experimental ATM network services environment (EXPANSE) prototype provides an experimental testbed for multimedia multiparty telecommunications services over heterogeneous communications networks. The EXPANSE software architecture supports the functional separation of call and connection control. At the call control layer an object-oriented, transaction-based call model provides for the co-ordination of the negotiations among users for the establishment, modification and disconnection of telecommunications services. The connection control layer provides an object-oriented protocol for the dynamic establishment, modification and release of network connections which include the control and allocation of network resources required for multimedia multiparty services. The EXPANSE software includes an application programming interface (API) to the signalling protocol at the call control level. The API provides a uniform and powerful interface to the call model and allows different applications to co-ordinate the control of local resources and session state.     

A case and framework for code analysis–based smartphone application energy estimation

The hype in the popularity of recent wireless technologies has increased applications of smartphones in various fields, particularly, education and health care. The trend of increasing application functionality to enrich smartphone users experience requires detailed insights of application energy consumption behavior. Smartphone application energy estimation helps investigate energy consumption behavior of applications at diversified granularity when it is run on resource‐constrained devices. Fine granular estimation gives more insights to the application energy consumption behavior to assist developers to propose resource‐friendly application designs. This study proposes a lightweight code analysis–based estimation framework to minimize high profiling overhead of use‐based estimation methods. Moreover, it analyzes estimation overhead and accuracy of existing dynamic estimation tools to present a case for code analysis–based energy estimation method. The estimated energy is found 86% accurate to the ground truth value for a set of benchmarks using our proposed framework.     

Mobile computing technology at Vindigo

Developing widely useful mobile computing applications presents difficult challenges. On one hand, mobile users demand intuitive user interfaces, fast response times, and deep relevant content. On the other hand, mobile devices have limited processing, storage, power, display, and communication resources. Vindigo has taken a technology-intensive approach to meeting these challenges and has created personal navigation tools that many people find useful in their everyday lives. Vindigo's Palm OS application, introduced in March 2000, has hundreds of thousands of users and continues to attract new users rapidly. This article presents some of the technology behind Vindigo. To provide context, it first gives an overview of a typical user session. It then discusses special demands and constraints placed on mobile applications, and enumerates design principles drawn from these considerations. The rest of the article describes technology developed at Vindigo according to those principles. Throughout, it emphasizes techniques that have proven effective in delivering location-based services on today's handheld devices.