End-user Mobile Devices Research Articles

Seamless communication techniques in mobile cloud computing: A survey

Achieving seamless communication and smooth service provision between the cloud and end user's mobile device is one of the main challenges existing in mobile cloud environments. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) allows cloud environments to mitigate resource limitation problems for mobile devices. The most popular mobile devices such as smartphones, autonomous vehicles, drones, and other smart electronic equipment are in constant motion and frequently change their point of connection (base station or edge) to mobile computing networks. In these situations of mobility, the data being transmitted, and the services being provided to the device should not be interrupted as the proper function of the device depends on these services. Applications that rely heavily on data and services stored in the cloud environment should be available even when the device has moved from one pole to another. Various existing generic surveys emphasize important solutions to some of the challenges faced in MCC. Different solutions were proposed to achieve seamless communication in MCC, presenting the taxonomy of the interworking and mobility techniques and their possibilities. However, they have not provided a clear evaluation of MCC techniques for achieving seamless communication and service provision, and have not taken into consideration current technological advances such as 5G, femtocell, etc. In this paper, we provide a survey of the different solutions proposed to achieve seamless communication in MCC by taking current technological advances into account. Furthermore, some shortcomings associated with the presented methods are outlined, along with the current issues and research challenges faced in MCC. However, for the purposes of data protection and security, previously proposed schemes already achieve the goal of protecting users' attribute privacy and they have the same access policy; some can even achieve full security, but they are just limited in decryption efficiency.

Evaluation of Resource Exhaustion Attacks against Wireless Mobile Devices

Currently, energy resource exhaustion attacks targeted on modern autonomously working mobile devices are becoming more and more important. The underdevelopment of specialized defenses against energy exhaustion attacks as well as their often hidden nature for the owner of the target device determine a necessity of an integrated approach to modeling and evaluation of this class of attacks and various types of intruders. The paper analyzes conditions of applicability of energy resource exhaustion attacks performed by various classes of intruders, models them on physical implementations of devices for two application areas, and calculates their performance indicators. Application areas are a TCP/IP network of end-user mobile devices and a self-organizing mesh network designed for operational management and emergency response.

PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS OF WIRELESS COLLABORATIVE NETWORK ON MOBILE DEVICES

Researchers and companies of telecommunication sector have been working hard to enhance wireless network infrastructure to fulfill the end user’s needs for Internet connectivity. However, it is not easy to satisfy the high demand and expectation of end users always. There are some situations where Internet connectivity is not enabled due to the locations and environmental constraint. For example, network infrastructure breakdown during a disaster or the user’s device is out of the network coverage area. Besides relying only on the network infrastructure provided by telecommunication companies, one possible strategy to provide Internet connectivity in the ubiquitous environment is to exploit the functionality of end-user mobile devices to be the tool to share Internet connectivity. This paper aims to identify the constraints and challenges of forming Wireless Collaborative Network (WCN) by the end user devices. To identify the constraints and challenges, we have reviewed and categorized the past and current research focusing on collaborating mobile devices in the mobile ad-hoc network for communication and resource sharing. For validation, a simple test case was conducted which involves few mobile devices in a random formation. Base on the finding, it is concluded that the biggest challenge of forming WCN is the ability of mobile devices to provide bridging functionality. This paper also discussed the expecting architecture of WCN and suggested the simulation tools with relevant metrics to be considered in this research area.

RFID Technology for Management and Tracking: e-Health Applications.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) has become a key technology in the logistics and management industry, thanks to distinctive features such as the low cost of RFID tags, and the easiness of the RFID tags’ deployment and integration within the items to be tracked. In consequence, RFID plays a fundamental role in the so-called digital factory or 4.0 Industry, aiming to increase the level of automatization of industrial processes. In addition, RFID has also been found to be of great help in improving the tracking of patients, medicines, and medical assets in hospitals, where the digitalization of these operations improves their efficiency and safety. This contribution reviews the state-of-the-art of RFID for e-Health applications, describing the contributions to improve medical services and discussing the limitations. In particular, it has been found that a lot of effort has been put into software development, but in most of the cases a detailed study of the physical layer (that is, the characterization of the RFID signals within the area where the system is deployed) is not properly conducted. This contribution describes a basic RFID system for tracking and managing assets in hospitals, aiming to provide additional details about implementation aspects that must be considered to ensure proper functionality of the system. Although the scope of the RFID system described in this contribution is restricted to a small area of the hospital, the architecture is fully scalable to cover the needs of the different medical services in the hospital. Ultra high-frequency (UHF) RFID technology is selected over the most extended near-field communication (NFC) and high-frequency (HF) RFID technology to minimize hardware infrastructure. In particular, UHF RFID also makes the coverage/reading area conformation easier by using different kinds of antennas. Information is stored in a database, which is accessed from end-user mobile devices (tablets, smartphones) where the position and status of the assets to be tracked are displayed.

Energy-aware task scheduling in mobile cloud computing

The limited energy supply, computing, storage and transmission capabilities of mobile devices pose a number of challenges for improving the quality of service (QoS) of various mobile applications, which has stimulated the emergence of many enhanced mobile computing paradigms, such as mobile cloud computing (MCC), fog computing, mobile edge computing (MEC), etc. The mobile devices need to partition mobile applications into related tasks and decide which tasks should be offloaded to remote computing facilities provided by cloud computing, fog nodes etc. It is very important yet tough to decide which tasks to be uploaded and where they are scheduled since this could greatly impact the applications’ timeliness and mobile devices’ lifetime. In this paper, we model the task scheduling problem at the end-user mobile device as an energy consumption optimization problem, while taking into account task dependency, data transmission and other constraint conditions such as task deadline and cost. We further present several heuristic algorithms to solve it. A series of simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the algorithms and the results show that our proposed algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art algorithms in energy efficiency as well as response time.

Human interaction with IoT-based smart environments

This paper describes concepts, design, implementation, and performance evaluation of a 3D-based user interface for accessing IoT-based Smart Environments (IoT-SE). The generic interaction model of the described work addresses some major challenges of Human-IoT-SE-Interaction such as cognitive overload associated with manual device selection in complex IoT-SE, loss of user control, missing system image or over-automation. To address these challenges we propose a 3D-based mobile interface for mixed-initiative interaction in IoT-SE. The 3D visualization and 3D UI, acting as the central feature of the system, create a logical link between physical devices and their virtual representation on the end user's mobile devices. By so doing, the user can easily identify a device within the environment based on its position, orientation, and form, and access the identified devices through the 3D interface for direct manipulation within the scene. This overcomes the problem of manual device selection. In addition, the 3D visualization provides a system image for the IoT-SE, which supports users in understanding the ambience and things going on in it. Furthermore, the mobile interface allows users to control the amount and the way the IoT-SE automates the environment. For example, users can stop or postpone system triggered automatic actions, if they don't like or want them. Users also can remove a rule forever. By so doing, users can delete smart behaviors of their IoT-SE. This helps to overcome the automation challenges. In this paper, we present the design, implementation and evaluation of the proposed interaction system. We chose smart meeting rooms as the context for prototyping and evaluating our interaction concepts. However, the presented concepts and methods are generic and could be adapted to similar environments such as smart homes. We conducted a subjective usability evaluation (ISO-Norm 9241/110) with 16 users. All in one the study results indicate that the proposed 3D-User Interface achieved a good high score according to the ISO-Norm scores.

Location-Based Services (LBS) in Micro-Scale Navigation

Pedestrians LBS are accessible by hand-held devices and become a large field of energetic research since the recent developments in wireless communication, mobile technologies and positioning techniques. LBS applications provide services like finding the neighboring facility within a certain area such as the closest restaurants, hospital, or public telephone. With the increased demand for richer mobile services, LBS propose a promising add-on to the current services offered by network operators and third-party service providers such as multimedia contents. The performance of LBS systems is directly affected by each component forming its architecture. Firstly, the end-user mobile device is still experiencing a lack of enough storage, limitations in CPU capabilities and short battery lifetime. Secondly, the mobile wireless network is still having problems with the size of bandwidth, packet loss, congestions and delay. Additionally, in spite of the fact that GPS is the most accurate navigation system, there are still some issues in micro scale navigation, mainly availability and accuracy. Finally, LBS server which hosts geographical and users information is experiencing difficulties in managing the huge size of data which causes a long query processing time. This paper presents a technical investigation and analysis of the performance of each component of LBS system for pedestrian navigation, through conducting several experimental tests in different locations. The results of this investigation have pinpointed the weaknesses of the system in micro-scale environments. In addition, this paper proposes a group of solutions and recommendations for most of these shortcomings.