Agent societies and social networks for ubiquitous computing

In ubiquitous computing environments, providing appropriate services and information to users at the right place in the right way is challenging for many reasons: different user interests, heterogeneous devices and services, dynamic networks, information overload, or differing privacy levels, for example. Agent technology is a paradigm expected to play an increasing role in complex computing environments, and due to the increasing popularity of social networking services, we expect to see the convergence of agent and social web technologies. The goal of this theme issue is to bring together state-of-the-art research contributions that examine the convergence of agent technologies and social networks for ubiquitous computing.     

Enhanced Active Queue Management for Multi-hop Networks

Wireless networks play a very important role in today’s modern world, convincingly surpassing the wired infrastructure in terms of popularity. Hence, it is important to ensure that services which access wired networks should also be accessible using a wireless network without any performance degradation. One of the most common variants in wireless communications is the Wireless Mesh Network (WMNs). WMNs exploit multi-hop wireless communications between wireless access points. Hence, the effective bandwidth decreases as the number of hops increases in a WMN, thus increasing latency and resulting in reduced performance. This may be due to spatial contention, multipath fading, interference or inefficient queuing mechanisms etc. Here we take queuing mechanisms into consideration and study the QMMN algorithm (Queue Management for Multi-hop Networks) which tends to improve throughput, fairness and reduce global synchronization problems. Based on our study, we implement a modified version of the QMMN algorithm, otherwise called the Enhanced QMMN (EQMMN) algorithm. EQMMN can be considered an effective algorithm which solves the problem of fairness between flows (either responsive or unresponsive) and eventually improves TCP throughput at wireless access points. Our experimental results prove that EQMMN algorithms have better performance characteristics such as throughput (TCP) and fairness index compared to QMMN algorithms.     

Studies of the Utility of Cross Linked Polyvinlpolypyrrolidine as a Tablet Disintegrant

Studies of different particle size grades of cross linked polyvinylpolypyrrolidone (Polyplasdone G.A.F. Corporation) In direct compression tablet formulations show that Increase in mean particle size enhances powder flow, disintegration and dissolution although hardness and friability were slightly better for tablets made from the finer grades. The disintegrant exhibits powerful disintegrant action at low concentrations. It should probably be rarely, if ever, necessary to use more than five per cent in a tablet in order to achieve rapid dissolution. It appears that the use of polyvinylpolypyrrolidone (P.V.P.P.) as a tablet disintegrant at high concentrations may be self limiting since certain properties such as powder flow, tablet weight variation, hardness and friability start to reach unacceptable levels at high disintegrant concentrations. Data presented in this paper indicates that tablets con-taining acetylsalicylic acid or multi-vitamins can be very effec-tively formulated using P.V.P.P. as a disintegrant.     

A voice-based real-time emotion detection technique using recurrent neural network empowered feature modelling

Multimedia Tools and Applications - The advancements of the Internet of Things (IoT) and voice-based multimedia applications have resulted in the generation of big data consisting of patterns,...     

A Distributed and Elastic Application Processing Model for Mobile Cloud Computing

The latest developments in mobile computing technology have increased the computing capabilities of smart mobile devices (SMDs). However, SMDs are still constrained by low bandwidth, processing potential, storage capacity, and battery lifetime. To overcome these problems, the rich resources and powerful computational cloud is tapped for enabling intensive applications on SMDs. In Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC), application processing services of computational clouds are leveraged for alleviating resource limitations in SMDs. The particular deficiency of distributed architecture and runtime partitioning of the elastic mobile application are the challenging aspects of current offloading models. To address these issues of traditional models for computational offloading in MCC, this paper proposes a novel distributed and elastic applications processing (DEAP) model for intensive applications in MCC. We present an analytical model to evaluate the proposed DEAP model, and test a prototype application in the real MCC environment to demonstrate the usefulness of DEAP model. Computational offloading using the DEAP model minimizes resources utilization on SMD in the distributed processing of intensive mobile applications. Evaluation indicates a reduction of 74.6% in the overhead of runtime application partitioning and a 66.6% reduction in the CPU utilization for the execution of the application on SMD.

     

Distributed context aware collaborative filtering approach for P2P service selection and recovery in wireless mesh networks

With the evolution of large number of social networking sites in which various users share the information at various levels in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) manner, there is a need of efficient P2P collaborative mechanisms to achieve efficiency and accuracy at each level. To achieve high level of accuracy and scalability, a distributed collaborative filtering (CF) approach for P2P service selection and recovery is proposed in this paper. The proposed approach is different from the traditional centralized approaches as both user and network views are modelled and an estimation of the service recovery time is included if some of the services are failed during execution. A novel Context Aware P2P Service Selection and Recovery (CAPSSR) algorithm is proposed. To filter the relevant contents for user needs, a new Distributed Filtering Metric (DFM) is included in the algorithm which selects the contents based upon the user input. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated with traditional centralized algorithm with respect to scalability and accuracy. The results obtained show that the proposed approach is better than the existing approaches in terms of accuracy and scalability.     

Anonymous proximity mobile payment (APMP)

The growth of wireless networks and the increasing popularity of mobile devices present an significant opportunity to empower them as a payment device. Unfortunately, several problems hinder the widespread acceptance of mobile payments, for example, privacy protection and user anonymity. Measures to ensure anonymity in payment systems must be considered as an important factor in privacy and system acceptance. We propose a new measure to enhance the level of anonymity in mobile payments where users can customize their anonymity, according to their personal preferences. We rely on IPAS (Implicit Password Authentication System) (Almuairfi et al. 2011) for dispute resolution to support our proposed idea.     

Design,implementation, and evaluation of a Programmable Bandwidth Aggregation System for home networks

Bandwidth aggregation is a promising technology that can speed up access to the Internet by bandwidth sharing and multi-path communication. Current Bandwidth Aggregation Systems (BASs) deployed in public networks provide limited performance and flexibility when they are directly used in home networking environments. To reap the full performance benefits of BASs in home networks, they need to be easily and dynamically programmable by home network users. We present the design and implementation of a Programmable Bandwidth Aggregation System (PBAS) that can provide home network users improved performance when sharing bandwidth for activities that access the Internet. We also present an empirical performance evaluation of the system and we demonstrate the superior efficiency of our proposed PBAS over a traditional BAS in terms of computational overheads, loadable code, throughput performance, and programmability.