3D Visualization on mobile devices

This paper discusses current status and recent advancements of 3D graphics on mobile platforms and describes open issues concerning its usage in different applications. We have treated two particular application fields. Firstly, we deal with problems of visualization of complex data structures on mobile devices. The implementation of a 3D visualization renderer on the Symbian platform for mobile devices is written as a C++ application and based on the DieselEngine^® as a rendering engine. 3D visualization of data is generated in the form of a Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) file meaning that actually any kind of 3D content written in VRML file format can be rendered on such a device. It was the result of a project the objective of which was to provide a user interface on a mobile platform displaying visualization of hierarchical Grid monitoring data. Secondly, we describe the system that brings face animation to embedded platforms. Face animation is considered to be one of the toughest tasks in computer animation today and its delivery to mobile platforms brings possibilities for development of new innovative and attractive services for the mobile market.     

A Time and Location Information Assisted OTP Scheme

As the mobile networks are springing up, mobile devices become a must gadget in our daily life. People can easily access Internet application services anytime and anywhere via the hand-carried mobile devices. Most of modern mobile devices are equipped with a GPS module, which can help get the real-time location of the mobile device. In this paper, we propose a novel authentication scheme which exploits volatile passwords—One-Time Passwords (OTPs) based on the time and location information of the mobile device to transparently and securely authenticate users while accessing Internet services, such as online banking services and e-commerce transactions. Compared to a permanent password base scheme, an OTP based one can prevent users from being eavesdropped. In addition to a memoryless feature, the scheme restricts the validness of the OTP password not only in a certain time period but also in a tolerant geometric region to increase the security protection. However, if a legitimate user is not in the anticipated tolerant region, the user may fail to be authenticated. Hence, a Short Message Service based mutual authentication mechanism is also proposed in the article to supplement the unexpected misjudgement. The proposed method with a volatile time/location-based password features more secure and more convenient for user authentication.     

A Privacy Preserving Method Using Privacy Enhancing Techniques for Location Based Services

The move towards service-oriented architectures and the increasing usage of mobile devices to access such services are two of the major changes in modern computing. Information about the user, their location and their trajectory can provide additional context information to a service, leading to useful applications such as directing a user to the nearest bus stop and displaying which buses are due to arrive in the next minutes. While this type of information can be useful, when the offered services are trusted, it also introduces privacy issues relating to gathering of location information for non-trusted applications like location-based marketing or user behaviour profiling. Users can limit their location information provided to a service but these controls are simple, making it important for the user to understand how their location information is being used by services. This paper reviews some of the methods currently being proposed to reduce the impact of location tracking on user privacy, and presents a novel encryption method for preserving the location and trajectory path of a user using Privacy-Enhancing Technologies.     

A Cooperative MAC Protocol for QoS Enhancement in Wireless USB Networks

Wireless USB (WUSB) is the USB technology merged with WiMedia PHY/MAC based on success of wired USB, and it can be applied to various mobile applications such as laptop, cellular phone, etc. Also, WUSB can provide the better user convenience than wired USB applications as well as be applied to the legacy USB application, since it provides high speed connection between host and devices for the compatibility with USB 2.0 specification and removes the cable among devices using the USB protocol. However the current WUSB protocol can’t prevent the QoS degradation occurred by mobile nodes with low data rate. This problem causes the critical problems in QoS provisioning to isochronous streams and mobile applications. Therefore, we propose a new cooperative MAC protocol for WUSB network with virtual MIMO (multi input multi output) link. Based on instantaneous channel state information among WUSB devices, our proposed protocol can intelligently select the transmission path with higher data rate between WUSB host and WUSB device as well as between WUSB device and WUSB device. Thus our proposed protocol can provide advanced QoS with minimum delay for real-time multimedia services.     

Priority-Oriented Architecture Service Management on OSGi Home-service Platform

Open Service Gateway initiative (OSGi) platforms integrate a variety of reusable applications and resources, packing them into bundles. These deployed services, which are offered by service providers, can expediently manage home appliances. However, in the user’s daily life, various services or bundles access to other services directly or indirectly, creating a situation that is likely to generate problems involving non-supportable applications or insufficient hardware resources. OSGi platforms are no way to deal with these situations. Although much research has proposed methods to resolve specific issues, almost all of these methods are incomplete or are unsuitable for the limited resources in households. This paper addresses the wide range of such common home-network applications as those involving health care, home automation, and home security; and both our proposed priority-based principles of a management decision-making mechanism and our framework architecture help ensure the quality of service and or emergency responses.     

Secure user authentication scheme with novel server mutual verification for multiserver environments

The fast growth of mobile services and devices has made the conventional single‐server architecture ineffective from the point of its functional requirements. To extend the scalability and availability of mobile services to various applications, it is required to deploy multiserver architecture. In 2016, Moon et al insisted that Lu et al's scheme is weak to insiders and impersonation attack, then they proposed a biometric‐based scheme for authentication and key agreement of users in multiserver environments. Unfortunately, we analyze Moon et al's scheme and demonstrate that their scheme does not withstand various attacks from a malicious registered server. We propose a user authentication scheme with server mutual verification to overcome these security drawbacks. The proposed scheme withstands an attack from malicious insiders in multiserver environments. We use a threshold cryptography to strengthen the process of server authorization and to provide better security functionalities. We then prove the authentication and session key of the proposed scheme using Burrows‐Abadi‐Needham (BAN) logic and show that our proposed scheme is secure against various attacks.     

A web service‐based internet of things framework for mobile resource augmentation

Mobile devices are the primary communication tool in day to day life of the people. Nowadays, the enhancement of the mobile applications namely IoTApps and their exploitation in various domains like healthcare monitoring, home automation, smart farming, smart grid, and smart city are crucial. Though mobile devices are providing seamless user experience anywhere, anytime, and anyplace, their restricted resources such as limited battery capacity, constrained processor speed, inadequate storage, and memory are hindering the development of resource‐intensive mobile applications and internet of things (IoT)‐based mobile applications. To solve this resource constraint problem, a web service‐based IoT framework is proposed by exploiting fuzzy logic methodologies. This framework augments the resources of mobile devices by offloading the resource‐intensive subtasks from mobile devices to the service providing entities like Arduino, Raspberry PI controller, edge cloud, and distant cloud. Based on the recommended framework, an online Repository of Instructional Talk (RIoTalk) is successfully implemented to store and analyze the classroom lectures given by faculty in our study site. Simulation results show that there is a significant reduction in energy consumption, execution time, bandwidth utilization, and latency. The proposed research work significantly increases the resources of mobile devices by offloading the resource‐intensive subtasks from the mobile device to the service provider computing entities thereby providing Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) to mobile users.     

BerlinTainment: an agent-based context-aware entertainment planning system

Service providers, especially in the mobile entertainment domain, are facing increasing competition. The ability to design, develop, and deploy unique context-aware entertainment services fast and easily as well as the capability to provide intuitive user interfaces becomes essential for market players. Furthermore, today's mobile world is made up of heterogeneous networks accessible via various devices with different characteristics. Progressive users have the desire to utilize the same services and access the same information content on all available devices. At the same time, service providers have to diversify their services in order to remain competitive and attract the various customer segments making up the mass market. We introduce an agent-based serviceware framework to assist service providers in developing innovative services, thus reducing the time to market of the respective applications. The realized serviceware framework offers personalization, location awareness, and the multi-access service platform, a flexible solution for ubiquitous service access. Thus, our solution allows a heterogeneous landscape of end devices to access an application server's mobile services in a multimodal, multilingual, and multimedia-based manner. We describe the utilization of the different modules of the service framework as well as the BerlinTainment application, an entertainment planning system based on the framework.     

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.     

Energy-Efficient Motion Related Activity Recognition on Mobile Devices for Pervasive Healthcare

Activity recognition plays an important role for pervasive healthcare such as health monitoring, assisted living and pro-active services. Despite of the continuous and transparent sensing with various built-in sensors in mobile devices, activity recognition on mobile devices for pervasive healthcare is still a challenge due to the constraint of resources, such as battery limitation, computation workload, etc. Keeping in view the demand of energy-efficient activity recognition, we propose a hierarchical method to recognize user activities based on a single tri-axial accelerometer in smart phones for health monitoring. Specifically, the contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, it is demonstrated that the activity recognition based on the low sampling frequency is feasible for the long-term activity monitoring. Second, this paper presents a hierarchical recognition scheme. The proposed algorithm reduces the opportunity of usage of time-consuming frequency-domain features and adjusts the size of sliding window to improve recognition accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, with more than 85 % recognition accuracy rate for 11 activities and 3.2 h extended battery life for mobile phones. Our energy efficient recognition algorithm extends the battery time for activity recognition on mobile devices and contributes to the health monitoring for pervasive healthcare.     

Using trusted computing for privacy preserving keystroke-based authentication in smartphones

Smartphones are increasingly being used to store personal information as well as to access sensitive data from the Internet and the cloud. Establishment of the identity of a user requesting information from smartphones is a prerequisite for secure systems in such scenarios. In the past, keystroke-based user identification has been successfully deployed on production-level mobile devices to mitigate the risks associated with naïve username/password based authentication. However, these approaches have two major limitations: they are not applicable to services where authentication occurs outside the domain of the mobile device—such as web-based services; and they often overly tax the limited computational capabilities of mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a protocol for keystroke dynamics analysis which allows web-based applications to make use of remote attestation and delegated keystroke analysis. The end result is an efficient keystroke-based user identification mechanism that strengthens traditional password protected services while mitigating the risks of user profiling by collaborating malicious web services. We present a prototype implementation of our protocol using the popular Android operating system for smartphones.     

A Context-Aware User Interface for Wireless Personal-Area Network Assistive Environments

The daily life of people with severe motor system impairments is challenging and thus often subordinated to extensive external help; increasing their level of self-support is thus highly desirable. Recent advances in wireless communications, in particular in wireless personal-area networks, serve as technological enablers well suited for implementing smart and convenient assistive environments which can increase self-support. This paper presents the design and prototyping of a versatile interface for such wireless assistive environments. We propose a modular framework that can accommodate several wireless personal-area network standards. The interface is built upon this framework and is designed in such a way that it can be controlled by various types of input devices such as a touch screen or a tongue-control unit. The interface can automatically discover consumer appliances (e.g. Zigbee and Bluetooth enabled lights and computers) in the user’s environment and display the services supported by these devices on a user-friendly graphical user interface. A demonstrator is prototyped and experimental results show that the proposed interface is context-aware, i.e. it successfully detects available appliances, adapts itself to the changes that occur in the user’s environment, and automatically informs the user about these changes. The results also show that the proposed interface is versatile and easy to use, i.e. the user can easily control multiple devices by means of a browser menu. Hence, the proposed work illustrates how assistive technology based on wireless personal-area networks can contribute to improving the quality of life of motor system impaired persons.     

Experiences with network-based user agents for mobile applications

Wireless networks are characterized by simple end devices and limited bandwidth. One solution to address these and other limitations of the wireless mobile environment that has been widely pursued is the placement of proxies, or agents, inside the network to assist with application processing that would normally take place on end devices. These agents can additionally manipulate data to reduce bandwidth requirements and assist in providing services. The design and implementation of a user agent is heavily impacted by the application it supports. In this paper we present our experiences with user agents in two different types of applications: telephony-based Personal Communication Services (PCS) and two-way messaging. To provide low latency service, the PCS user agents are mobile so that they may be kept close to their end devices. The design of the PCS agents limits migration overhead to the transfer of approximately 100 bytes of information in about 150 milliseconds. To provide advanced messaging services, the messaging user agent supports flexible messages while limiting air interface bandwidth usage. The messaging agents reduce uplink bandwidth usage by approximately 35% when applied to a cellular PCS system, and reduce message payloads by 97%. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Design and implementation of Ad-Hoc collaborative proxying scheme for reducing network energy waste

Network devices are equipped with low power states but they are rarely activated due to their inability of maintaining network connectivity. Recently, Network Connectivity Proxy (NCP) concept has been proposed in literature as an effective mechanism to exploit full potential of low power features on network devices by impersonating their virtual presence. However, the NCP concept faces several open issues and challenges especially related to proxying of TCP connections and majority of daily used proprietary closed-source applications. This paper presents a new approach for reducing network energy waste through intelligent collaboration among daily used devices (e.g., desktop computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc). It guarantees to run applications on only and only one user device that is under active use at that specific moment. To reduce energy waste and allow idle devices to sleep, our approach also takes benefit from a light-weight home gateway proxy with very basic practically realizable functionalities. The proposed system not just reduces energy waste of fixed devices but also enables mobile devices to significantly improve their battery life. Our developed software prototypes allow devices to autonomously and seamlessly collaborate with each other without requiring any configuration or user input. Further, this paper also presents the basic performance evaluation of developed prototypes in real networking environments.     

移动边缘计算中基于联邦学习的视频请求预测和协作缓存策略

随着互联网社交平台的崛起和移动智能终端设备的普及,自媒体短视频、直播等视频业务蓬勃发展,人们对高质量视频服务的需求也急剧上升。与此同时,连接到核心网络的大量智能设备增加了回程链路的负载,传统的云计算难以满足用户对视频服务的低延迟要求。移动边缘计算(MEC)通过在网络边缘部署具有计算和存储能力的边缘节点,通过在更靠近用户的边缘侧提高计算和存储服务,降低了数据传输时延进而缓解了网络阻塞。因此,基于MEC架构,该文充分利用网络边缘资源,提出了基于联邦学习的视频请求预测和视频协作缓存策略。通过利用多个边缘节点对提出的深度请求预测模型(DRPN)视频请求预测模型进行联邦训练,预测视频未来的请求情况,然后量化缓存内容所带来的时延收益并协作地以最大化该时延收益为目的进行缓存决策。该文分析了真实数据集MovieLens,模拟了视频请求缓存场景并进行实验。仿真结果表明,相比于其他策略,所提策略不仅能有效降低用户等待时延,在有限的缓存空间中提高内容多样性,从而提高缓存命中率,降低缓存成本,还能降低整个系统的通信成本。     

An efficient authentication system of smart device using multi factors in mobile cloud service architecture

Mobile cloud computing environments have overcome the performance limitation of mobile devices and provide use environments not restricted by places. However, user information protection mechanisms are required because of both the security vulnerability of mobile devices and the security vulnerability of cloud computing. In this paper, a multifactor mobile device authentication system is proposed to provide safety, efficiency, and user convenience for mobile device use in cloud service architectures. This system improves security by reinforcing the user authentication required before using cloud computing services. Furthermore, to reinforce user convenience, the system proposed increases the strength of authentication keys by establishing multiple factors for authentication. For efficient entries in mobile device use environments, this system combines mobile device identification number entries, basic ID/password type authentication methods, and the authentication of diverse user bio‐information. This system also enhances authentication efficiency by processing the authentication factors of a user's authentication attempt in a lump instead of one by one in the cloud computing service environment. These authentication factors can be continuously added, and this authentication system provides authentication efficiency even when authentication factors are added. The main contribution is to improve high security level by through authentication of mobile devices with multifactors simultaneously and to use the mobile cloud service architecture for its efficient processing with respect to execution time of it. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hybrid model for dynamic evaluation of trust in cloud services

Cloud computing, a new paradigm in distributed computing, has gained wide popularity in a relatively short span of time. With the increase in the number, functionality and features of cloud services, it is more and more mind-boggling for the cloud users to find a trustworthy provider. Cloud users need to have confidence in cloud providers to migrate their critical data to cloud computing. There must be some means to determine reliability of service providers so that users can choose services with the assurance that the provider will not act malignantly. An effort has been made in this paper to formulate a hybrid model to calculate the trustworthiness of service providers. Cloud services are evaluated and trust value is calculated based on compliance and reputation. Service logs based compliance reflects dynamic trust. The reputation has been computed from collective user feedback. Feedback rating is the view of each user about the invoked services. The discovered services that fulfill the user requirements are ranked based on their trust values and top-k cloud services are recommended to the user. The proposed approach is efficient and considerably improves service-selection process in cloud applications.     

Mobile payments in global markets using biometrics and cloud

Payment methods using mobile devices instead of using traditional methods (cash, credit card, etc) has been gaining popularity all over the world. The ubiquitous nature of smartphones and tablets has widened the ambit for using these devices for payments and other daily life activities. Recent advancements in mobile technology along with the convenience of mobile devices made these applications possible. Despite the worldwide user adoption of mobile applications, security is the key challenge in mobile banking and payments system. Mobile payments systems need to be very efficient and provide utmost security endlessly. State‐of‐the‐art mobile payment systems need the physical presence of a merchant agent to make a payment. In this article, we had described in detail about the design and implementation of a mobile payments application, used to make in‐store purchases and make secure payments without any physical presence of a cashier or a merchant agent. We proposed a novel privacy‐preserving and secure authentication algorithm to make mobile payments using biometrics. The analysis and experimental results show the reliability and efficiency of our proposed solution.     

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.