Smart Mobility Services Research Articles

Smart technologies for assisting the life quality of persons in a mobile environment: a review

Extant methods for quality-of-life enhancement cannot be applied to assist people in mobile environments. For overcoming this problem, this paper investigates how smart technologies can be applied to enhance the life quality of a person in a mobile environment. First, a number of smart technology applications were analyzed, from which the smart technologies suitable for improving a specific life quality were found out. To a person in a mobile environment, awareness, comfort, efficiency, immediacy, mobility, preparedness, and responsiveness were considered as more important types of the life quality. To improve these, the most effective smart technologies were concluded as smart mobile services, smart phone, smart glasses/spectacles/contact lens, and smart surveillance camera. The contribution of this study includes a systematic procedure for applying smart technologies to improving the life quality of a mobile person, and a novel method that involves applying the Kano quality model to quantify life quality from several innovative viewpoints. The results provided useful guides for making plans to improve the life quality of persons in a mobile environment.

GoWSB: A Smart Mobility Service to Promote Sustainable School Transport

Background Our EPSRC Digital Economy sustainable school transport project involves the fields of transport, psychology and mobile technology. The delivery of a real-time tracking smart mobility service called ‘goWSB’ enables families to visualise the progression of their child's walking school bus (WSB) towards school. In partnership with school communities, we investigated the extent to which the service benefits the quality of the waiting experience, making sustainable travel more convenient to users. Unlike goWSBs, traditional WSBs run without technology, and involve children walking together to school as a group managed by a coordinator (WSBC). WSBs run according to a timetable to enable families to estimate when their child should join. In contrast, the goWSB innovation relies on users accessing real-time information, enabling families to visually track the goWSB icon on screen from their own home. Using the goWSB app, parents and children track the goWSB as it departs from its starting point and travels along designated stops until it reaches the school. In this way, while the WSBC is being tracked, families can access real-time estimates of the goWSB arrival time at their chosen stop and parents get reassurance of when the WSB arrives at the school. Notably, goWSB involves a shift away from a fixed time schedule associated with traditional WSBs towards offering users a seamless connection. To this end, our research addressed the extent to which users from diverse time cultures would actually tolerate a shift from a fixed-time schedule towards a more flexible one. We also researched into the value of traditional WSBs, as outlined. Methods Based on studies involving 9173 children, we identified the strength of the evidence base around role of WSBs in children's health. In turn, this enabled us to identify how traditional WSBs could be made more convenient. In addition, our goWSB service intervention was tested in six primary schools involving 43 parents from a range of socio-demographics for up to one month, using experimental vs control condition. Results One primary research outcome that individual time ‘culture’ made a statistically significant difference to the perceived quality of waiting time. Conclusions The outcome from the trial suggested some types of cognitive temporal perspectives users may be more suited to early adoption than others. However, overall the results indicated support for goWSB service - and to this end, we launch the service.

Design and Evaluation of Smart Mobile Services for Cross-Channel Shopping

This study explores the potential of smart mobile services to enhance online and offline shopping. Three prototypes were designed and implemented on smart phones and smart watches. Thirty young adults participated in the experiment to evaluate these prototypes. The results indicate that satisfaction with smart services is influenced by characteristics such as innovativeness, current shopping behavior, and design of prototypes. Positive feedback was generally given towards smart mobile services, but there were mixed attitudes towards key features. First, participants with a utilitarian motivation liked the indoor navigation feature, but those with a hedonic motivation enjoyed exploration. Second, in the area of big data, participants wanted more control over recommendations and more protection of privacy. Third, participants wanted to make mobile payments but were concerned about security. Finally, developers of new technology for smart mobile services should consider practicability.

Software defined wireless networks (SDWN): Part 1 [Guest Editorial

The growing popularity of smart phones, tablet computers and mobile cloud services places an increasing demand for dynamic services from wireless networks. This demand creates new requirements for the network architecture, such as flexibility in management and configuration, adaptability and vendor-independence. To meet these requirements, software defined wireless network (SDWN) has been proposed as a cost-effective solution. SDWN decouples the data plane from the control plane, enabling direct programmability of network controls and an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure for wireless applications. With SDWN, we can create a service delivery platform that is adaptable to the users' varying demands. However, issues such as supporting a large number of subscribers, frequent mobility, fine-grained measurement and control, and real-time adaptation need to be addressed by future SDWN architectures. In this Feature Topic, we provide an overview of the latest major developments and progresses in SDWN.

Light commodity devices for building vehicular ad hoc networks: An experimental study

Vehicular communication networks represent both an opportunity and a challenge for providing smart mobility services by using a hybrid solution that relies on cellular connectivity and short range communications. The evaluation of this kind of network is overwhelmingly carried out in the present literature with simulations. However, the degree of realism of the results obtained is limited because simulations simplify real world interactions too much in many cases. In this article, we define an outdoor testbed to evaluate the performance of short range vehicular communications by using real world personal portable devices (smartphones, tablets, and laptops), two different PHY standards (IEEE 802.11g and IEEE 802.11a), and vehicles. Our test results on the 2.4 GHz band show that smartphones can be used to communicate vehicles within a range up to 75 m, while tablets can attain up to 125 m in mobility conditions. Moreover, we observe that vehicles equipped with laptops exchange multimedia information with nodes located further than 150 m. The communications on the 5 GHz band achieved an effective transmission range of up to 100 m. This, together with the optimization of the protocols used, could take our commodity lightweight devices to a new realm of use in the next generation of ad hoc mobility communications for moving through the city.

Technoeconomic performance of wireless networks supporting smart mobile devices and services: Evaluation of technology-centric cum marketing performance indicators

The scope of this study is to evolve a rational strategy to prescribe a performance measure on the prevailing mobile services and platforms that support emerging smart devices concurrent to traditional incumbents of feature cell phones. It is a motivated effort to judiciously include the economics-related parameters in conjunction with technology-specific details so as to deduce a cohesive performance metric in order to compare the state-of-the-art mobile services and related operations. In relevantly existing strategies, such performance comparison of mobile services is done purely on the basis of technology-dictated parameters on the speed of wireless traffic (in bps). The so-called PCMag.com assessments prescribe thereof, a mobile speed index (MSI) to determine the performance of mobile networks and identify the "fastest network" that prevails in a service area. However, while deducing such MSI values, the approach pursued does not include any underlying economics-related facts relevant to service areas and/or periods of assessment. Hence, the present study is done to elucidate a coherently viable, technology-cum-economics based performance metric on mobile services in vogue. A technoeconomic parameter is identified thereof, and it is termed as relative technoeconomic performance index (RTPI); hence, a comprehensive comparison is furnished on the MSI values (of PCMag.com) versus the RTPI values pertinent to set of available data. Concluding remarks on the pros and cons of adopting `technology-alone' details (sans economics parameters) in decision-making on relative performance of mobile services (especially in the contexts of supporting smart- and feature-devices) are presented.

Study on Signaling Storm in 3G Networks

Signaling storm becomes one of the complicated problems for 3G networks due to booming development of smart phones and mobile internet services. In this paper, the basic mechanisms of fast dormancy, resource allocation and periodic heartbeat signaling for typical services are analyzed, as signaling storm is caused by the discoordination between terminals, networks and services. Some improvement suggestions are also proposed to reduce the network overhead under the guaranteed user experience.

Inteligencia ambiental en los servicios de información sobre movilidad y redes críticas de transporte

i-Tour es un modelo de negocio para un sistema basado en la localización, i-Tour es sinónimo de "sistemas de transporte inteligentes para la optimización de los desplazamientos urbanos" y resulta en un escenario caracterizado por la amplia difusión de las conexiones inalámbricas a escala urbana y regional, por los servicios de movilidad de transporte multimodal.Se desarrollará en un marco abierto para ser utilizado por diferentes proveedores, autoridades y ciudadanos para proporcionar inteligentes servicios multimodales de movilidad, además apoyará al cliente y sugiere, de un modo fácil de usar, las diferentes formas de transporte, teniendo en cuenta las preferencias del usuario, así como información en tiempo real sobre las condiciones de la carretera, el clima, el estado del transporte público de la red. Contará con una interfaz muy fácil de usar accesibles desde PC, PDA y teléfonos inteligentes. Está diseñado para promover el uso del transporte público, fomentando las opciones de transporte sostenible y proporcionando mecanismos para recompensar a los usuarios que eligen opciones públicas de viaje