Pervasive Services Research Articles

IMPROVING EFFICIENCY OF SERVICE-ORIENTED CONTEXT-DRIVEN SOFTWARE AGENTS

The case for integrating software agent and web service paradigms has been well documented, and we believe that convergence of these two paradigms, enhanced with context awareness, can enable more efficient and effective pervasive services. Software agents in service-oriented environments have traditionally been limited to either using, providing, or aggregating services. We propose that in dynamic heterogeneous environments it would be sometimes beneficial if the agent, in addition to invoking remote services, could acquire the capacity to execute functionality provided by the service and run it locally. To this end, we build a performance analysis model that compares time consumption and network load of service access with that of component use. We argue that such a model would allow an agent to dynamically select the more efficient alternative. We present a multicriteria decision-making model that helps dynamic selection, describe experiments comparing the two approaches, and discuss results and lessons learned.

Pervasive Web Mapping, Geoprocessing and Services

Pervasive Web Mapping, Geoprocessing and Services

Markets in eighteenth century Bengal economy

This article explores the emergence, functioning and growth of markets in early modern Bengal and suggests the existence of decentralised interlinked exchange sites whose numbers increased over the course of the eighteenth century, with founders from diverse social groups and clearly delineated rules about establishment and resolution of conflict. Markets were both extensive as well as efficient with panoply of market regulations to ensure the smooth functioning of these sites. Investment made by different strata of society, guiding principles determining the spatial and temporal distribution of market places, the pervasive and robust service industry, internal consumption and mercantile penetration, in agriculture as well as other sectors, consolidated the process of commercialisation and shaped the provincial economy. A differentiated merchant community, with differing scales of operation, area and profit margin, serviced this economy. Both the indigenous and the early Company state were beneficiaries of the taxes but they were not the prime movers. The Nizamat of Bengal played a facilitating role in the smooth functioning of the market places, but the state even in the later part of the eighteenth century did not or could not act as the sole unilateral arbiter of all that was happening in the economic sphere.

Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems

Here we present the overall objectives and approach of the SAPERE (“Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems”) project, focussed on the development of a highly-innovative nature-inspired framework, suited for the decentralized deployment, execution, and management, of self-aware and adaptive pervasive services in future network scenarios.

Towards nature-inspired pervasive service ecosystems: Concepts and simulation experiences

Pervasive and mobile computing devices increasingly populate our environments. In this context, innovative frameworks have to be identified for the deployment and execution of pervasive service systems made up of a massive number of components, and able to exhibit properties of self-organization and self-adaptability, and of long-lasting evolvability. This paper discusses how such frameworks could get inspiration from natural systems, by modeling and deploying services as autonomous agents, spatially situated in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices, all of which acting, interacting, and evolving according to a limited set of “laws of nature”. A conceptual architecture is introduced to frame the key concepts of nature-inspired approaches and to survey the key natural metaphors that can be adopted to realize the concept of pervasive service ecosystems. Following, the key characteristics of our original ecological approach are detailed, also with the help of representative case studies, and an extensive set of simulation experiments are reported to show the potential effectiveness of the approach.

A UPnP extension for enabling user authentication and authorization in pervasive systems

Abstract The Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) specification defines a set of protocols for promoting pervasive network connectivity of computers and intelligent devices or appliances. Nowadays, the UPnP technology is becoming popular due to its robustness to connect devices and the large number of developed applications. One of the major drawbacks of UPnP is the lack of user authentication and authorization mechanisms. Thus, control points, those devices acting as clients on behalf of a user, and UPnP devices cannot communicate based on user information. This paper introduces an extension of the UPnP specification called UPnP-UP, which allows user authentication and authorization mechanisms for UPnP devices and applications. These mechanisms provide the basis to develop customized and secure UPnP pervasive services, maintaining backward compatibility with previous versions of UPnP.

Context-aware pervasive service composition and its implementation

Incorporating service composition and pervasive computing into managing users' complex everyday activities calls for the Pervasive Service Composition paradigm for everyday life. In this paper, we propose the concept of Context-Aware Pervasive Service Composition (CAPSC), which aims at enabling a pervasive system to provide user service compositions that are relevant to the situation at hand. We investigate CAPSC requirements and design a CAPSC architecture by taking into account context-aware peer coordination, context-aware process service adaptation, and context-aware utility service adaptation. We present a proof of concept application prototype as well.

LOBIN: E-Textile and Wireless-Sensor-Network-Based Platform for Healthcare Monitoring in Future Hospital Environments

This paper describes a novel healthcare IT platform developed under the LOBIN project, which allows monitoring several physiological parameters, such as ECG, heart rate, body temperature, etc., and tracking the location of a group of patients within hospital environments. The combination of e-textile and wireless sensor networks provides an efficient way to support noninvasive and pervasive services demanded by future healthcare environments. This paper presents the architecture, system deployment as well as validation results from both laboratory tests and a pilot scheme developed with real users in collaboration with the Cardiology Unit at La Paz Hospital, Madrid, Spain.

Secure and Private Service Discovery in Pervasive Computing Environments

With the convergence of embedded computers and wireless communication, pervasive computing has become the inevitable future of computing. Every year, billions of computing devices are built. They are ubiquitously deployed and are gracefully integrated with people and their environments. Service discovery is an essential step for the devices to properly discover, configure, and communicate with each other. Authentication for pervasive service discovery is difficult. In this chapter, we introduce a user-centric service discovery model, called PrudentExposure, which automates authentication processes. It encodes hundreds of authentication messages in a novel code word form. Perhaps the most serious challenge for pervasive service discovery is the integration of computing devices with people. A critical privacy challenge can be expressed as a “chicken-andegg problem”: both users and service providers want the other parties to expose sensitive information first. We discuss how a progressive and probabilistic model can protect both users’ and service providers’ privacy.

Semantic Management of Nonfunctional Requirements in an e-Health System

We have designed an ontological environment that makes provisions for choosing adequate devices for remote monitoring of patients who are suffering from poststroke health complications. We argue that nonfunctional requirements in e-health systems, designed for remote patient monitoring, can be managed through semantics stored in ontological models and reasoning performed on them. Our contribution is twofold: (1) we address the pervasiveness of e-health systems by choosing devices embedded in them, and through patients' expectations in terms of having access to pervasive health services personalized to their needs; and (2) we enrich the specification of nonfunctional requirements for remote patient monitoring by highlighting their role in the development of e-healthcare systems.

MHS: a context‐enabled regulated framework for pervasive services

PurposePervasive computing environments such as a pervasive campus domain, shopping, etc. will become commonplaces in the near future. The key to enhance these system environments with services relies on the ability to effectively model and represent contextual information, as well as spontaneity in downloading and executing the service interface on a mobile device. The system needs to provide an infrastructure that handles the interaction between a client device that requests a service and a server which responds to the client's request via Web service calls. The system should relieve end‐users from low‐level tasks of matching services with locations or other context information. The mobile users do not need to know or have any knowledge of where the service resides, how to call a service, what the service API detail is and how to execute a service once downloaded. All these low‐level tasks can be handled implicitly by a system. The aim of this paper is to investigate the notion of context‐aware regulated services, and how they should be designed, and implemented.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents a detailed design, and prototype implementation of the system, called mobile hanging services (MHS), that provides the ability to execute mobile code (service application) on demand and control entities' behaviours in accessing services in pervasive computing environments. Extensive evaluation of this prototype is also provided.FindingsThe framework presented in this paper enables a novel contextual services infrastructure that allows services to be described at a high level of abstraction and to be regulated by contextual policies. This contextual policy governs the visibility and execution of contextual services in the environment. In addition, a range of contextual services is developed to illustrate different types of services used in the framework.Originality/valueThe main contribution of this paper is a high‐level model of a system for context‐aware regulated services, which consists of environments (domains and spaces), contextual software components, entities and computing devices.

Valuation of Alternative Business Models in Information, Communication and Media Markets

Information, Communication and Media Markets (ICMM) are in a process of tremendous change. IP-based technologies and services such as broadband and triple/quadruple-play are realities that have the ability to enforce the convergence of so far parallel industries, that is, Telephony, Internet, and Broadcast. In this paper, the authors derive a scenario where a telecom operator aims to design, develop, and validate a global B3G (Beyond 3rd Generation) framework to support secure, personalized, and pervasive telecommunications services built on heterogeneous network and service infrastructures. The authors rethink the telecommunications architecture and business models to enable easy, seamless, and pervasive access to content and services, while supporting user preferences and context. This proposal involves significant changes in current industry business models. A value chain approach allows the identification of different scenarios, where the firm faces several options from which to choose. The authors investigate operators’ decision process and evaluates the project based on its flexibility, using a real option approach.

A novel user’s authentication scheme for pervasive on-line media services

Due to the explosive growth of the Internet and the pervasion of multimedia, protection of intellectual property (IP) rights of digital content in transactions induces people's concerns. Current security requirements and copyright protection mechanisms especially need to work in real-time and on-line for communication and networking. For media service systems in the Internet, user's authentication is most essential in association with the access control of the media system. The authentication scheme is a trivial but crucial issue for maintaining user's information. Up to now, many one-time password-based authentication schemes have been proposed. However, none is secure enough. The purpose of a one-time password (OTP) is to make it more difficult to gain unauthorized access to restricted resources. Traditionally static passwords can more easily be obtained by an unauthorized intruder given enough attempts and time. By constantly altering the password, as is done with a one-time password, this risk can be greatly reduced. These schemes are specially fit for media services in the Internet since they will frustrate the attacker's attempt. Lin, Shen and Hwang proposed a strong-password authentication scheme in association with one-time password by using smart cards, and claimed their scheme can resist guess attack, replay attack, impersonation attack and stolen attack. Later, Ku, Tsai, and Chen showed that Lin-Shen-Hwang's scheme suffers from a replay attack and a denial-of-service attack. Furthermore, Ku proposed a hash-based strong-password authentication scheme to enhance the security. In this paper, we show the weaknesses and devise some attacks against Ku's scheme. Then, we revise Ku's scheme and propose a novel user's authentication scheme in pervasive on-line media services for current communication and networking.

Dynamic algorithms for autonomic pervasive services in mobile wireless environments

Pervasive services have attracted numerous attentions from both industries and academia. Its very high adaptability demand makes autonomic computing (AC), and in particular, personal autonomic computing (PAC), an ideal enabling technology. Some generic AC frameworks have been proposed in the literature but without considering the dynamic deployment and re-configuration of pervasive service components in a self-controlled manner. Further, very little attention has been paid to providing autonomic pervasive services in mobile wireless environments. This paper addresses above issues. In particular, a service component self-deployment algorithm using partitioning techniques is proposed and evaluated; a simple service re-configuration algorithm is also presented; and a service self-healing mechanism is proposed. In addition, an AC environment is proposed and its major building blocks being discussed. This AC environment serves as the container of the proposed service component self-deployment, self-configuration and self-healing mechanisms. A prototype of the system has been designed and implemented. Experiment results have shown the effectiveness of the proposed mechanisms.

Collaborative defence as a pervasive service: architectural insights and validation methodologies of a trial deployment

Network defence is an elusive art. The arsenal to defend our devices and networks from attack is constantly lagging behind the latest methods used by attackers to break into them. To counteract this trend, we developed a distributed approach comprised of collaborative end-host detectors. Simulations reveal dramatic improvements over stand-alone detectors in accuracy (fewer false alarms) and in quality (the ability to capture otherwise undetected stealthy anomalies). Although these results derive from botnet detection in enterprise networks, they have broader applicability to the self-manageability of pervasive computing devices. To test this claim, Intel Corporation partnered with British Telecommunications plc to launch a trial deployment. In this paper, we report on architectural insights and validation methodologies gleaned from the development of a testbed infrastructure and phased experiments. Finally, we propose Collaborative Defence as a blueprint for emergent collaborative systems and its measurement-everywhere approach as the adaptive underpinnings needed for pervasive services.

Remote control for pervasive services

In this paper, we present the REACHeS architecture for controlling pervasive services through physical user interfaces, using a mobile terminal and icons placed in the environment. An icon advertises a service that can be started by touching the icon with a mobile terminal. This service activation configures the mobile terminal as a remote control for the service. We have implemented this architecture and designed an icon set. The physical user interface is based on RFID technology: the terminals are equipped with RFID readers and RFID tags are placed under the icons. We present the first prototype applications and the first usability tests that we have carried out.

Providing Adapted Contextual Information in an Overlay Vehicular Network

Current vehicular networks are developed upon commercial solutions based on cellular networks (CNs) or vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), both present in numerous research proposals. Current approximations are not enough to cover the communication necessities of several applications at the same time, and they are not suitable for future vehicular pervasive services. The vehicular network presented in this paper fills the existent gap between solutions lacking in flexibility, mainly supported by an infrastructure deployment, and those highly local and distributed, such as sole-VANET approximations. In this manner, an overlay communication platform which can work over the CN basis has been designed and developed. This architecture is complemented by an additional support of an information system located at the infrastructure side. Moreover, since most of the information received from current notification services is not relevant for the driver, an additional subsystem has been devised to provide adapted information to users. This has been carried out by means of an ontology model which represents users' preferences and contextual information. Finally, using a whole prototype of the telematic platform, the performance of this interring process has been evaluated to point out its impact on the system operation.

Context-driven migration and diffusion of pervasive services on the OSGi framework

The ubiquity of wireless ad hoc networks and the benefits of loosely coupled services have fostered a growing interest in service-oriented architectures for pervasive computing. Context-aware services and runtime adaptation are key to expedite human interaction with dynamic pervasive computing environments. We explore two types of live service mobility to avoid service disruptions in mobile ad hoc networks. Service migration moves a service at runtime from one host to another including its state, while service diffusion replicates the service and the state on multiple hosts. We analyse the basic requirements for service mobility and evaluate our OSGi-based implementation for service mobility with real life experiments. Our results show that the overhead of state transfer and synchronisation is limited for relatively small applications and that the delay for handing over to a replicated service in a small scale network with enforced network failures remains minimal.

Perci: Pervasive Service Interaction with the Internet of Things

The advancement of ubiquitous computing technologies has greatly improved the availability of digital resources in the real world. Here, the authors investigate mobile interaction with tagged, everyday objects and associated information that's based on the Internet of things and its technologies. Their framework for integrating Web services and mobile interaction with physical objects relies on information typing to increase interoperability. Two prototypes for mobile interaction with smart posters build upon this framework to realize multi-tag interaction with physical user interfaces. The authors' evaluation identifies usability issues regarding the design of physical mobile interactions, interfaces, and applications.

QoS-Aware Service Selection Algorithms for Pervasive Service Composition in Mobile Wireless Environments

The successful application of pervasive services running in mobile wireless networks and devices relies on its ability to provide efficient and cost-effective QoS (Quality of Service) support. This paper proposes a comprehensive QoS model specifically for pervasive services. It considers not only user-perceived factors but also mobile wireless network characteristics. The corresponding formula to calculate each QoS criterion is also devised. In particular, this paper formulates the QoS-aware service selection problem for pervasive service composition and proposes some solutions to the problem, i.e., global-search-based LOSSA (local optimal service selection algorithm) and limited broadcast based LOSSA-k. The evaluation results of the algorithms have shown the effectiveness of the QoS model and the efficiency of the proposed LOSSAs.