Technologies for ubiquitous supercomputing: a Java interface to the Nexus communication system

We use the term ubiquitous supercomputing to refer to systems that integrate low- and mid-range computing systems, advanced networks and remote high-end computers with the goal of enhancing the computational power accessible from local environments. Such systems promise to enable new applications in areas as diverse as smart instruments and collaborative environments. However, they also demand tools for transporting code between computers and for establishing flexible, dynamic communication structures. In this article, we propose that these requirements be satisfied by introducing Java classes that implement the global pointer and remote service request mechanisms defined by a communication library called Nexus. Java supports transportable code; Nexus provides communication support and represents the core communication framework for Globus, a project building infrastructure for ubiquitous supercomputing. We explain how this NexusJava library is implemented and illustrate its use with examples. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Migration of existing software systems to mobile computing platforms: a systematic mapping study

Mobile computing has fast emerged as a pervasive technology to replace the old computing paradigms with portable computation and context-aware communication. Existing software systems can be migrated (while preserving their data and logic) to mobile computing platforms that support portability, context-sensitivity, and enhanced usability. In recent years, some research and development efforts have focused on a systematic migration of existing software systems to mobile computing platforms.To investigate the research state-of-the-art on the migration of existing software systems to mobile computing platforms. We aim to analyze the progression and impacts of existing research, highlight challenges and solutions that reflect dimensions of emerging and futuristic research.We followed evidence-based software engineering (EBSE) method to conduct a systematic mapping study (SMS) of the existing research that has progressed over more than a decade (25 studies published from 1996–2017).We have derived a taxonomical classification and a holistic mapping of the existing research to investigate its progress, impacts, and potential areas of futuristic research and development.The SMS has identified three types of migration namely Static, Dynamic, and State-based Migration of existing software systems to mobile computing platforms.Migration to mobile computing platforms enables existing software systems to achieve portability, context-sensitivity, and high connectivity. However, mobile systems may face some challenges such as resource poverty, data security, and privacy. The emerging and futuristic research aims to support patterns and tool support to automate the migration process. The results of this SMS can benefit researchers and practitioners–by highlighting challenges, solutions, and tools, etc., –to conceptualize the state-ofthe- art and futuristic trends that support migration of existing software to mobile computing.     

A foundation for the study of behavior change support systems

The emerging ambient persuasive technology looks very promising for many areas of personal and ubiquitous computing. Persuasive applications aim at changing human attitudes or behavior through the power of software designs. This theory-creating article suggests the concept of a behavior change support system (BCSS), whether web-based, mobile, ubiquitous, or more traditional information system to be treated as the core of research into persuasion, influence, nudge, and coercion. This article provides a foundation for studying BCSSs, in which the key constructs are the O/C matrix and the PSD model. It will (1) introduce the archetypes of behavior change via BCSSs, (2) describe the design process for building persuasive BCSSs, and (3) exemplify research into BCSSs through the domain of health interventions. Recognizing the themes put forward in this article will help leverage the full potential of computing for producing behavioral changes.     

An energy-efficient object discovery protocol for context-sensitive middleware for ubiquitous computing

Many ubiquitous computing applications may be context-sensitive due to the ambient environments, mobile devices, and other detectable factors. A context-sensitive middleware provides the necessary support to context-sensitive application objects to participate in spontaneous and ad hoc communications with other applications in remote devices whenever suitable contexts exist. A context-sensitive middleware can provide this support effectively if its communication subsystem, such as an Object Request Broker (ORB), can properly discover other objects in devices. This capability is usually known as object discovery protocol. An energy-efficient object discovery protocol is needed to help prolong a device's battery life because many devices in ubiquitous computing environments are battery-powered and, thus, have limited energy sources. An energy-efficient object discovery protocol, RKS, for context-sensitive middleware for ubiquitous computing is presented. RKS reduces energy consumption by reducing the amount of information that needs to be sent to remote devices to discover objects. A novel feature of RKS is that it advertises its server-objects' availability only when it detects that these servers can be activated in the current context and when it finds that the neighbor devices have some potential clients that are willing to discover objects. Analytical comparisons of the energy-consumptions are given between RKS and two other protocols for object discovery in context-sensitive middleware. Furthermore, our experimental results, based on the implementations of these protocols and RKS on a context-sensitive middleware test bed, confirm our analytical results in that the RKS conserves more energy than the other two.     

Paratyping: A Contextualized Method of Inquiry for Understanding Perceptions of Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing Technologies

In this article, we describe the origins, use, and efficacy of a contextualized method for evaluating mobile and ubiquitous computing systems. This technique, which we called paratyping, is based on experience prototyping and event-contingent experience sampling and allows researchers to survey people in real-life situations without the need for costly and sometimes untenable deployment evaluations. We used this tool to probe the perceptions of the conversation partners of users of the Personal Audio Loop, a memory aid with the potential for substantial privacy implications. Based on that experience, we refined and adapted the approach to evaluate SenseCam, a wearable, automatic picture-taking device, across multiple geographic locations. We describe the benefits, challenges, and methodological considerations that emerged during our use of the paratyping method across these two studies. We describe how this method blends some of the benefits of survey-based research with more contextualized methods, focusing on trustworthiness of the method in terms of generating scientific knowledge. In particular, this method is a good fit for studying certain classes of mobile and ubiquitous computing applications but can be applied to many types of applications.     

Enabling real-time information service on telehealth system over cloud-based big data platform

A telehealth system covers both clinical and nonclinical uses, which not only provides store-and-forward data services to be offline studied by relevant specialists, but also monitors the real-time physiological data through ubiquitous sensors to support remote telemedicine. However, the current telehealth systems do not consider the velocity and veracity of the big-data system in the medical context. Emergency events generate a large amount of the real-time data, which should be stored in the data center, and forwarded to remote hospitals. Furthermore, patients’ information is scattered on the distributed data center, which cannot provide a high-efficient remote real-time service. In this paper, we proposes a probability-based bandwidth model in a telehealth cloud system, which helps cloud broker to provide a high performance allocation of computing nodes and links. This brokering mechanism considers the location protocol of Personal Health Record (PHR) in cloud and schedules the real-time signals with a low information transfer between different hosts. The broker uses several bandwidth evaluating methods to predict the near future usage of bandwidth in a telehealth context. The simulation results show that our model is effective at determining the best performing service, and the inserted service validates the utility of our approach.     

Seamless User-Level Handoff in Ubiquitous Multimedia Service Delivery

Advancing mobile computing technologies are enabling ubiquitous personal computing environment. In this paper, we focus on an important problem in such environment: user mobility. In the case of user mobility, a user is free to access his/her personalized service at anytime, anywhere, through any possible mobile/fixed devices. Providing mobility support in this scenario poses a series of challenges. The most essential problem is to preserve the user's access to the same service despite changes of the accessing host or service provider. Existing system-level mobility solutions are insufficient to address this issue since it is not aware of the application semantics. On the other hand, making each application to be mobility-aware will greatly increase the development overhead. We argue that the middleware layer is the best place to address this problem. On one hand, it is aware of application semantics. On the other hand, by building application-neutral mobility functions in the middleware layer, we eliminate the need to make each application mobility-aware. In this paper, we design a middleware framework to support user mobility in the ubiquitous computing environment. Its major mobility functions include user-level handoff management and service instantiation across heterogeneous computing platforms. We validate the major mobility functions using our prototype middleware system, and test them on two multimedia applications (Mobile Video Player and Mobile Audio Player). To maximally approximate the real-world user-mobility scenario, we have conducted experiments on a variety of computing platforms and communication paradigms, ranging from T1-connected high-end PC to handheld devices with wireless networks. The results show that our middleware framework is able to provide efficient user mobility support in the heterogeneous computing environment.     

An adaptive access method for broadcast data under an error-pronemobile environment

A ubiquitous information environment can be achieved by the mobile computing technologies. In this environment, users carrying their portable computers can retrieve local or remote information anywhere and at anytime. Data broadcast, with its advantages, has become a powerful means to disseminate data in wireless communications. Indexing methods for the broadcast data have been proposed to speedup access time and reduce power consumption. However, the influence of access failures has not been discussed. For the error-prone mobile environment, the occurrence of access failures is often due to disconnections, handoffs, and communication noises. Based on the distributed indexing scheme, we propose an adaptive access method which tolerates the access failures. The basic idea is to use index replication to recover from the access failures. One mechanism, named search range, is provided to dynamically record the range where the desired data item may exist. According to the search range, an unfinished search can be efficiently resumed by finding an available index replicate. A performance analysis is given to show the benefits of the method. Also, the concept of version bits is applied to deal with the updates of the broadcast data     

Healthcare support for underserved communities using a mobile social media platform

Emerging digital technologies for healthcare information support have already contributed to reducing the digital divide among rural communities. Although mobile health (m-health) applications facilitate provision of support for treatment consultation in real-time, their substantial potential has not yet been operationalised for decision support to meet citizen demand in developing nations. Modern healthcare information access, especially in rural areas of developing countries, is critical to effective healthcare, since both information and expert opinions are limited. Mobile phone and social media penetration, however, is often extensive. In this paper, we design and evaluate an innovative mobile decision support system (MDSS) solution for rural citizens healthcare decision support and information dissemination.Developed using a design science approach, the instantiated artifact connects underserved rural patients in Bangladesh to general practitioners (GPs) – allowing GPs, based on queries and information support provided, to evaluate patient conditions virtually and provide answers for further diagnosis or treatment. A cloud platform using social media embodies health record information and is used with a rating technique that matches queries to profiled remote experts, participating asynchronously. A comprehensive evaluation of the MDSS artifact ensures its utility, efficacy, and reliability.     

The Esperanto Broker: a communication platform for nomadic computing systems

There is an increasing demand for middleware for nomadic computing applications. Owing to the inherent characteristics of such environments, these platforms have to address two fundamental issues: (i) device disconnections and the limitations of wireless networks may force users to experience short periods of service unavailability; and (ii) the complexity to design and develop next‐generation mobile computing applications. This paper proposes the Esperanto Broker (EB), a communication platform that addresses mobility issues via an integrated approach, i.e. at data‐link, network, and middleware levels. Decoupling interactions are achieved via a tuple‐space underlying infrastructure. To support developers with advanced services, the EB enhances the distributed objects computing model providing the abstraction for the communication paradigms standardized by the W3C. Esperanto applications can be modeled as sets of objects that are distributed over mobile devices, which communicate via remote method invocations (RMIs). RMIs natively implement pull and push models, in both one‐to‐one and one‐to‐many multiplicity. The paper focuses on the EB design issues, essential aspects of the implementation, and performance evaluations of the implemented prototype. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mobile devices and intelligent agents—towards a new generation of applications and services

If mobile computing is to become the pre-dominant computer usage paradigm in the coming years as is widely anticipated, a substantial increase in the demand for mobile computing applications and services will arise. How best to engineer such applications remains an open question and is naturally the focus of much research. In this article, we propose the use of intelligent agents as the constituent entities around which such applications and services can be conceptualised and realised. We describe the design and implementation of Gulliver’s Genie, an archetypal ubiquitous computing application that commissions a collaborative embedded agents approach.     

Automatic adaptation of mobile applications to different user devices using modular mobile agents

Wearable, handheld, and embedded or standalone intelligent devices are becoming quite common and can support a diverse range of applications. In order to simplify development of applications which can adapt to a variety of mobile devices, we propose an adaptation framework which includes three techniques: follow‐me, context‐aware adaptation, and remote control scheme. For the first, we construct a personal agent capable of carrying its owner's applications. Second, we design a personal agent capable of carrying applications with an adaptable hierarchical structure. Then, applications can be adapted approximately to the context of evices by using an attribute‐based component decision algorithm. Finally, to achieve a remote control scheme, we distribute the computational load of applications on the resource‐restricted mobile devices. An application is divided into two parts that can be executed on a user device and a server separately. In short, this framework facilitates the development of widespread applications for ubiquitous computing environments. Furthermore, it enables the applications to follow their owners and automatically adapt to different devices. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Potential cyberterrorism via a multimedia smart phone based on a web 2.0 application via ubiquitous Wi-Fi access points and the corresponding digital forensics

Cyberterrorism has become a hotly debated research issue in the past decades because of the convergence of mobile computing powers and the fledging multimedia communication computing capabilities. Cyberterrorism is the exploitation of computer network tools to incur malfunction or shut down critical infrastructures with several keyboard punches, which is dramatically different from traditional terrorism. Due to the ubiquitous multimedia communication tools, they have radically transformed the ways concerning data transmission. Unfortunately, it also incurs unprecedented opportunities for committing cyber crimes that we were not able to foresee two decades ago. Undoubtedly, the mushrooming proliferation of mobile phones spectacularly triggers the information security leakage while most people heavily rely on mobile phones for daily communication. As cybercrime or cyberterrorism surges, digital forensics (DF) of mobile communication devices still enormously lags behind than computer forensics. Hence, in this research paper, we provide a hypothetical case review concerning the DF of a potential cyberterrorist attack that was triggered by a mobile multimedia smart phone utilizing a popular web 2.0 application program via ubiquitous Wi-Fi access points. The corresponding DF of the mobile device was conducted in a step-by-step manner as well as the crime scene reconstruction based on the digital evidence collected, analyzed, and preserved.     

Conference assistant system for supporting knowledge sharing in academic communities

This paper describes our ongoing attempts to build a communityware system by presenting a project of providing digital assistants to support participants in an academic conference. We provided participants at the conference with a personal assistant system with mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies and facilitated communication among the participants. We also made online services available via the Web to encourage the participants to continue their relationships even after the conference. In this paper, we show the system we provided for the project and report the results.     

Software architecture and mobility: A roadmap

Modern software-intensive systems are characterized not only by the movement of data, as has been the case in traditional distributed systems, but also by the movement of users, devices, and code. Developing effective, efficient, and dependable systems in the mobile setting is challenging. Existing architectural principles need to be adapted and novel architectural paradigms devised. In this paper, we give an overview of the intersection of the areas of software architecture and mobility. We consider mobility from two related perspectives: (1) mobile software, which represents the computing functionality designed to migrate across hardware devices at runtime and execute on mobile hardware platforms, and (2) mobile systems, which are computing applications that include mobile software and hardware elements. We study the advances in both these areas, highlight representative existing solutions, and identify several remaining research challenges.     

普适计算环境中移动电话一种新的应用模式

随着计算技术和通信技术的发展,各种兼有通信和计算能力的手持信息设备将变得无处不在。它将为人们提供各种方便的服务,但它们的资源和能力又严重受限。因此如何通过利用环境拥有的资源来增强用户手持设备的能力是一个尚待解决的热点问题。该文针对移动电话,讨论了它在普适计算环境下一种新的应用模式,然后论述了实现该应用模式需要解决的一些关键技术,并描述了支持该应用模式的体系结构。文章最后给出了该应用模式的一个实例———利用移动电话个性化使用公共显示设备。     

Generic support for distributed applications

In the late 1980s, software designers introduced middleware platforms to support distributed computing systems. Since then, the rapid evolution of technology has caused an explosion of distributed-processing requirements. Application developers now routinely expect to support multimedia systems and mobile users and computers. Timely response to asynchronous events is crucial to such applications, but current platforms do not adequately meet this need. Another need of existing and emerging applications is the secure interoperability of independent services in large-scale, widely distributed systems. Information systems serving organizations such as universities, hospitals, and government agencies require cross-domain interaction. To meet the needs of these applications, Cambridge University researchers developed middleware extensions that provide a flexible, scalable approach to distributed-application development. This article details the extensions they developed, explaining their distributed software approach and the support it has provided for emerging applications     

车辆边缘计算环境下任务卸载研究综述

计算密集和延迟敏感型车辆应用的出现对车辆设备有限的计算能力提出了严峻的挑战,将任务卸载到传统的云平台会有较大的传输延迟,而移动边缘计算专注于将计算资源转移到网络的边缘,为移动设备提供高性能、低延迟的服务,因此可作为处理计算密集和延迟敏感的任务的一种有效方法.同时,鉴于城市地区拥有大量智能网联车辆,将闲置的车辆计算资源充分利用起来可以提供巨大的资源和价值,因此在车联网场景下,结合移动边缘计算产生了新的计算模式——车辆边缘计算.近年来,智能网联车辆数量的增长和新兴车辆应用的出现促进了对车辆边缘计算环境下任务卸载的研究,本文对现有车辆边缘计算环境下任务卸载研究进展进行综述,首先,从计算模型、任务模型和通信模型三个方面对系统模型进行梳理、比较和分析.然后介绍了最小化卸载延迟、最小化能量消耗和应用结果质量三种常见的优化目标,并按照集中式和分布式两种不同的决策方式对现有的研究进行了详细的归类和比较.此外,本文还介绍了几种常用的实验工具,包括SUMO、Veins和VeinsLTE.最后,本文围绕卸载决策算法复杂度、安全与隐私保护和车辆移动性等方面对车辆边缘计算任务卸载目前面临的挑战进行了总结,并展望了车辆边缘计算环境下任务卸载未来的发展方向与前景.     

面向移动互联网的智能家居系统研究

智能家居是未来家居的发展方向;3G时代的到来和移动互联网的快速发展,为智能家居远程控制和应用构建了高速的通信平台;面向移动互联网构建智能家居系统是物联网大潮下智能家居发展的一个制高点;首先对目前智能家居系统的主要联网技术标准进行了研究,提出了采用家庭控制软总线的多协议适配机制解决智能家居系统多标准多底层通信平台的融合问题;家庭控制软总线同时提供了智能家庭应用与移动互联网之间的高速通信接口;基于家庭控制软总线,给出了面向移动互联网的智能家居系统组网方案,并描述了方案中主要模块的实现方法;该方案相对于传统技术有两个显著的特点:基于移动网络的高速远程智能家庭应用和多平台无缝集成。     

Interest spaces: A unified interest-based dissemination framework for opportunistic networks

Embedded ubiquitous computing systems (EUCS) promise to grow remarkably in the near future. For such systems, new communication technologies are constructed to cope with the increasing functional and temporal demans. Because of the ubiquitousness of mobile devices nowadays, for example, traditional publish/subscribe is no longer an adequate model for data dissemination in mobile networks. Since any node can publish content at any time, the network can get congested easily, so a dissemination paradigm where mobile nodes contribute with a fraction of their resources is needed, through the use of opportunistic networks. Furthermore, a suitable organization for data dissemination in mobile networks should be centered around interests. Thus, we propose a unified interest-based dissemination framework for opportunistic networks entitled Interest Spaces, which simplifies dissemination by just allowing applications to mark data items with certain tags, letting the framework handle the caching, routing, forwarding, and disseminating. Similarly, applications that need to subscribe to channels simply have to specify the tags they are interested in, and the framework does the rest. However, the Interest Spaces framework also allows applications to have more control over the dissemination process if they wish, by specifying various criteria and dissemination rules. In this article, we present the architecture and components of Interest Spaces. We focus on data aggregation at the context layer, showing through simulations the benefits it brings in opportunistic dissemination. We also present a real-life use case for Interest Spaces through Chatty, an opportunistic chat application.