A Web-based, Offline-able, and Personalized Runtime Environment for executing applications on mobile devices

An increasing number of people use cell phones daily. Users are not only capable of making phone calls, but can also install applications on their mobile phones. When creating mobile applications, developers usually encounter the cross-platform incompatibility problem (for example, iPhone applications cannot be executed on the Android platform). Moreover, because mobile Web browsers have increasingly supported more and more Web-related standards, Web applications are more possible to be executed on different platforms than mobile applications. However, the problem of Web application is that it cannot be executed in offline mode. This study proposes a Web-based platform for executing applications on mobile devices. This platform provides several services for developers such as offline service, content adaptation service, and synchronization service. With the help of the proposed platform, application developers can develop and publish offline Web applications easily with simplified external Web content and synchronization capability.     

A trustworthy agent-based encrypted access control method for mobile cloud computing environment

To strengthen the security of access control protocols for mobile cloud environment, dynamic attributes of mobile devices are used. The weak or disconnection issue of the mobile network is a critical task to deal with. The proposed approach provides access control as well as data confidentiality using dynamic attributes encryption. The pairs of mobile agents are used to deal with the issue of network connection. The secret key is distributed using the anonymous key-issuing protocol which preserves the anonymity of the user. The approach is implemented in a real mobile cloud environment, and the performance under various parameters is evaluated.     

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

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

SelfMotion: A declarative approach for adaptive service-oriented mobile applications

Modern society increasingly relies on mobile devices. This explains the growing demand for high quality software for such devices. To improve the efficiency of the development life-cycle, shortening time-to-market while keeping quality under control, mobile applications are typically developed by composing together ad-hoc developed components, services available on-line, and other third-party mobile applications. Applications are thus built as heterogeneous compositions, whose characteristics strongly depend on the components and services they integrate. To cope with unpredictable changes and failures, but also with the various settings offered by the plethora of available devices, mobile applications need to be as adaptive as possible. However, mainstream adaptation strategies are usually defined imperatively and require complex control strategies strongly intertwined with the application logic, yielding to applications that are difficult to build, maintain, and evolve. We address this issue by proposing a declarative approach to compose adaptive heterogeneous mobile applications. The advantages of this approach are demonstrated through an example inspired by an existing worldwide distributed mobile application, while the implementation of the proposed solution has been validated through a set of simulations and experiments aimed at illustrating its performance.     

Multi-layer faults in the architectures of mobile, context-aware adaptive applications

Modern hand-held devices are equipped with multiple context sensors exploited by increasingly sophisticated software applications, called Context-Aware Adaptive Applications (CAAAs), that adapt automatically to changes in the surrounding environment, such as by responding to the location and speed of the user. The architecture of CAAAs is typically layered and incorporates a context-awareness component to support processing of context values and triggering of adaptive changes. While this layered architecture is very natural for the design and implementation of CAAAs, it exhibits new kinds of failures that arise as a result of faults that are specific to the choice of technology for specific layers. In this paper we investigate the occurrence of such faults and failures that manifest across architectural layers, and we describe samples of such failures in four CAAAs.     

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.     

SmartVisionApp: A framework for computer vision applications on mobile devices

In this paper a novel framework for the development of computer vision applications that exploit sensors available in mobile devices is presented. The framework is organized as a client–server application that combines mobile devices, network technologies and computer vision algorithms with the aim of performing object recognition starting from photos captured by a phone camera. The client module on the mobile device manages the image acquisition and the query formulation tasks, while the recognition module on the server executes the search on an existing database and sends back relevant information to the client. To show the effectiveness of the proposed solution, the implementation of two possible plug-ins for specific problems is described: landmark recognition and fashion shopping. Experiments on four different landmark datasets and one self-collected dataset of fashion accessories show that the system is efficient and robust in the presence of objects with different characteristics.     

Output-oriented power saving mode for mobile devices

Fast battery discharge is still the most nerve wracking issue for smartphone users. Though many energy saving methods have been studied, still users are not satisfied with their phone’s battery. Power management system provides low power mode when the phone is not in use for a long time. When the user is interacting with the phone, current system assumes the user is interactive and should keep the device in active mode. However, this is not true. After the user’s interaction, the device processes the request and displays the result on the smartphone’s output device. During this period, the user cannot see any meaningful information from the phone. In this paper, we propose a new low power mode where we put smartphone’s output device into low power mode while phone is preparing result for the user. We named this as o-sleep, an output-oriented power saving mode. While a device is processing a user’s request, output from the device may require preparation time. We consider the situation as the device’s output idle time and put the phone’s user interfaces into sleep mode while maintaining other subsystems in active state. To prove our concept, we have applied our technique onto various smartphone applications with varying operation environment. From the experiment, we found that the smartphone entered the o-sleep mode up to 58% of its total usage time in various test scenarios. Usability study supported feasibility of our proposed method.     

Algorithms for validating E-tickets in mobile computing environment

E-tickets issued online can be used by different vendors to provide services such as discount coupons for E-shopping, or an entrance for a football game. One major issue associated with E-tickets is the problem of validation, which becomes more severe in a mobile environment due to mobility of a mobile host (MH) and frequent failure/disconnection of validation servers known as mobile support stations (MSSs). Some additional problems include the identification of duplicate submissions of an E-ticket by a MH. Thus, this paper proposes two protocols using the Flat and Hierarchical schemes for E-ticket processing and validation in a mobile environment that guarantee at least and at most once property (each E-ticket is validated at least and at most once). The protocols have been validated and compared through complexity analysis and experiments.     

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.     

Social-aware hybrid mobile offloading

Mobile offloading is a promising technique to aid the constrained resources of a mobile device. By offloading a computational task, a device can save energy and increase the performance of the mobile applications. Unfortunately, in existing offloading systems, the opportunistic moments to offload a task are often sporadic and short-lived. We overcome this problem by proposing a social-aware hybrid offloading system (HyMobi), which increases the spectrum of offloading opportunities. As a mobile device is always co-located to at least one source of network infrastructure throughout of the day, by merging cloudlet, device-to-device and remote cloud offloading, we increase the availability of offloading support. Integrating these systems is not trivial. In order to keep such coupling, a strong social catalyst is required to foster user’s participation and collaboration. Thus, we equip our system with an incentive mechanism based on credit and reputation, which exploits users’ social aspects to create offload communities. We evaluate our system under controlled and in-the-wild scenarios. With credit, it is possible for a device to create opportunistic moments based on user’s present need. As a result, we extended the widely used opportunistic model with a long-term perspective that significantly improves the offloading process and encourages unsupervised offloading adoption in the wild.     

Puzzle: A mobile application development environment using a jigsaw metaphor

ObjectiveCreate a visual mobile end user development framework, named Puzzle, which allows end users without IT background to create, modify and execute applications, and provides support for interaction with smart things, phone functions and web services.MethodsDesign of an intuitive visual metaphor and associated interaction techniques for supporting end user development in mobile devices with iterative empirical validation.ResultsOur results show that the jigsaw is an intuitive metaphor for development in a mobile environment and our interaction techniques required a limited cognitive effort to use and learn the framework. Integration of different modalities and usage of smart things was relevant for users.ConclusionPuzzle has addressed the main objective. The framework further contributes to the research on mobile end user development in order to create an incentive for users to go beyond consuming content and applications to start creating their own applications.PracticeUsage of a mobile end user development environment has the potential to create a shift from the conventional few-to-many distribution model of software to a many-to-many distribution model. Users will be able to create applications that fit their requirements and share their achievements with peers.ImplicationsThis study has indicated that the Puzzle visual environment has the potential to enable users to easily create applications and stimulate exploration of innovative scenarios through smartphones.     

Securing dynamic itineraries for mobile agent applications

In this paper we present a novel mechanism for the protection of dynamic itineraries for mobile agent applications. Itineraries that are decided as the agent goes are essential in complex applications based on mobile agents, but no approach has been presented until now to protect them. We have conceived a cryptographic scheme for shielding dynamic itineraries from tampering, impersonation and disclosure. By using trust strategically, our scheme provides a balanced trade-off between flexibility and security. Our protection scheme has been thought always bearing in mind a feasible implementation, and thus facilitates the development of applications that make use of it. An example application based on a real healthcare scenario is also presented to show its operation.     

Realtime training on mobile devices for face recognition applications

Due to the increases in processing power and storage capacity of mobile devices over the years, an incorporation of realtime face recognition to mobile devices is no longer unattainable. However, the possibility of the realtime learning of a large number of samples within mobile devices must be established. In this paper, we attempt to establish this possibility by presenting a realtime training algorithm in mobile devices for face recognition related applications. This is differentiated from those traditional algorithms which focused on realtime classification. In order to solve the challenging realtime issue in mobile devices, we extract local face features using some local random bases and then a sequential neural network is trained incrementally with these features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and the feasibility of its application in mobile devices through empirical experiments. Our results show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms several popular face recognition methods with a dramatic reduction in computational speed. Moreover, only the proposed method shows the ability to train additional samples incrementally in realtime without memory failure and accuracy degradation using a recent mobile phone model.     

Seed-based authentication for mobile clients across multiple devices

Authenticating users for mobile cloud apps has been a major security issue in recent years. Traditional passwords ensure the security of mobile applications, but it also requires extra effort from users to memorize complex passwords. Seed-based authentication can simplify the process of authentication for mobile users. In the seed-based authentication, images can be used as credentials for a mobile app. A seed is extracted from an image and used to generate one-time tokens for login. Compared to complex passwords, images are more friendly to mobile users. Previous work had been done in seed-based authentication which focused on providing authentication from a single device. It is common that a mobile user may have two or more mobile devices. Authenticating the same user on different devices is challenging due to several aspects, such as maintaining the same credential for multiple devices and distinguishing different users. In this article, we aimed at developing a solution to address these issues. We proposed multiple-device authentication algorithms to identify users. We adopted a one-time token paradigm to ensure the security of mobile applications. In addition, we tried to minimize the authentication latency for better performance. Our simulation showed that the proposed algorithms can improve the average latency of authentication for 40% at most, compared to single-device solutions.     

Double-track mobile robot for hazardous environment applications

This paper introduces a link-type tracked vehicle, which is developed for potential applications such as fire fighting, handicapped assistance and mine detection in various hazardous environments. The vehicle consists of three parts—front frame, rear frame and body. The front frame is connected to the rear frame by a rotational passive adaptation mechanism, which is the driving mechanism of the vehicle. This is similar to a link structure such that one frame rotates to the other by external forces between the vehicle and the ground. This passive adaptation mechanism permits good adaptability to uneven terrain including stairs. This link structure also improves energy efficiency, and makes the vehicle simple and small. The body is a control system for remote control of the vehicle. It communicates visual and distance information to the operator, and commands direction and velocity orders.