Stuttgart, Univ., Studienarb., 2004.

Thesis (M.Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 52-53). Also available in electronic version.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 136-142).

The use of mobile phones and other mobile devices are becoming widespread and almost all of these mobile devices have some sort of mobile Internet access. Due to the increase in mobile Internet usage, many websites need altering in order to become mobile compatible. Creating a mobile compatible version of a website is challenging due to formatting and capability restrictions imposed by the mobile device. Currently, one of the popular methods of creating a mobile compatible website involves the creation of a new, dedicated mobile version of the website. However, this approach can prove to be expensive, and repetitive, since a fully functional desktop version of the website often already exists. A second method involves the use of a transformation proxy to transform the traditional website into a mobile compatible version. This research develops a transformation framework that enables a web developer to create a single set of source files that can be used to render output compatible with both traditional and mobile devices. In developing this framework, capabilities and restrictions of the mobile device were examined. Furthermore, current mobile web development guidelines and best practices were discussed. This resulted in the development of a method to identify and outline areas of a traditional website for transformation into a mobile friendly format. Furthermore, a transformation engine that allowed processing of the traditional website into a mobile compatible website was developed. This transformation engine extracted the outlined areas, and rendered the extracted content, all while maintaining the website’s original functionality. The development of a prototype verified that the transformation concepts are valid, and provided for the development of guidelines and recommendations. The development of a framework to enable the web developer to create a website once, and enable it to adapt its output for mobile devices, will have a positive impact on the development of content for the mobile web.

The fusion of computers and communications has promised to herald the age of information super-highway over high speed communication networks where the ultimate goal is to enable a multitude of users at any place, access information from anywhere and at any time. This, in a nutshell, is the goal envisioned by the Personal Communication Services (PCS) and Xerox's ubiquitous computing. In view of the remarkable growth of the mobile communication users in the last few years, the radio frequency spectrum allocated by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) to this service is still very limited and the usable bandwidth is by far much less than the expected demand, particularly in view of the emergence of the next generation wireless multimedia applications like video-on-demand, WWW browsing, traveler information systems etc. Proper management of available spectrum is necessary not only to accommodate these high bandwidth applications, but also to alleviate problems due to sudden explosion of traffic in so called hot cells. In this dissertation, we have developed simple load balancing techniques to cope with the problem of tele-traffic overloads in one or more hot cells in the system. The objective is to ease out the high channel demand in hot cells by borrowing channels from suitable cold cells and by proper assignment (or, re-assignment) of the channels among the users. We also investigate possible ways of improving system capacity by rescheduling bandwidth in case of wireless multimedia traffic. In our proposed scheme, traffic using multiple channels releases one or more channels to increase the carried traffic or throughput in the system. Two orthogonal QoS parameters, called carried traffic and bandwidth degradation, are identified and a cost function describing the total revenue earned by the system from a bandwidth degradation and call admission policy, is formulated. A channel sharing scheme is proposed for co-existing real-time and non-real-time traffic and analyzed using a Markov modulated Poisson process (MMPP) based queueing model. The location management problem in mobile computing deals with the problem of a combined management of location updates and paging in the network, both of which consume scarce network resources like bandwidth, CPU cycles etc. An easily implementable location update scheme is developed which considers per-user mobility pattern on top of the conventional location area based approach and computes an update strategy for each user by minimizing the average location management cost. The cost optimization problem is elegantly solved using a genetic algorithm.

Cloud Computing has started to become a viable option for computing centers and mobile consumers seeking to reduce cost overhead, power consumption, and increase software services available within their platform. For instance distributed memory constrained mobile devices can expand their ability to share real time data by utilizing virtual memory located within the cloud. Cloud memory services can be configured to restrict read and write access to the shared memory pool on a partner by partner basis. Utilization of such resources in turn reduces hardware requirements on mobile devices while lessening power consumption for each physical resource. Within the Cloud Computing paradigm, computing resources are provisioned to consumers on demand and guaranteed through service level agreements. Although the idea of a computing utility is not new, its realization has come to pass as researchers and corporate companies embark on a journey of implementing highly scalable cloud environments. As new solutions and architectures are proposed, additional use cases and consumer concerns have been revealed. These issues range from consumer security, adequate service level agreements and vendor interoperability, to cloud technology standardizations. Further, the current state of the art does not adequately address these needs for mobile consumers, where services need to be guaranteed even as consumers dynamically change locations. Due to the rapid adoption of virtualization stacks and the dramatic increase of mobile computing devices, cloud providers must be able to handle logical and physical mobility of consumers. As consumers move throughout geographical regions, there exists the probability that a consumer’s new locale may hinder a producer’s ability to uphold service level agreements. This inability is due to the fact that a producer may not have physical resources located relatively close to a mobile consumer’s new locale. As a consequence, producers must either continue to provide degraded resource consumption or migrate workloads to third party producers in order to ensure service level agreements are maintained. The goal of this report is to research existing architectures that provide the ability to adequately uphold service level agreements as mobile consumers move from locale to locale. Further we propose an architecture that can be implemented along with existing solutions in order to ensure consumers receive adequate service levels regardless of locality. We believe this architecture will lead to increased cloud interoperability and decreased consumer to producer platform coupling. / text

Smartphones have become crucial enablers for users to exploit online services such as learning, leisure, communicating, and socializing. The user-perceived quality of applications and services is an important factor to consider, in order to achieve lean resource management, to prevent user churn and revenue depletion of service or network providers. This is often studied within the scope of Quality of Experience (QoE), which has attracted researchers both in academia and industry. The objective of this thesis is to study the most important factors influencing QoE on smartphones and synthesize solutions for intervention. The temporal impairments during a real-time energy-hungry video streaming are studied. The aim is to quantify the influence of temporal impairments on the user-perceived video QoE at the network and application level together with energy measurements, and also to propose solutions to reduce smartphone energy consumption without degrading the user’s QoE on the smartphone for both user-interactive, e.g., video, and non-interactive cases. QoE measurements on smartphones are performed throughout in-the-wild user studies. A set of quantitative Quality of Experience (QoE) assessment tools are implemented and deployed for automatic data logging at the network- and application-level. Online momentary survey, Experience Sampling Method (ESM) software, and Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) along weekly face-to-face user interviews are employed. The subjective QoE is obtained through qualitative feedback including Mean Opinion Score (MOS) as well as in-situ indications of poor experiences by users. Additionally, energy measurements on smartphones are conducted in controlled-lab environment with the Monsoon device. The QoE of smartphone applications and services perceived by users depends on many factors including anomalies in the network, application, and also the energy consumption. At the network-level, high packet delay variation causes long video freezes that eventually impact negatively the end-user perceived quality. The freezes can be quantified as large time gaps in-between the displayed pictures during a video stream at the application-level. We show that the inter-picture time in cellular-based video stream can be represented via two-state exponential ON/OFF models. We show models representing the non-linear relationship between the QoE and the mean inter-picture time. It is shown that energy measurements help to reveal the temporal impairments in video stream enabling energy consumption as a QoE indicator. Next, energy waste and saving during temporal impairments are identified. Additionally, other video streaming use cases, e.g., “download first and watch later”, are studied and appropriate energy-saving download scheduling mechanisms are recommended. The possibility for decreasing energy consumption when the smartphone screen is OFF, while maintaining QoE, is revealed. We first show exponential models to represent user’s interaction with smartphone, then propose a NyxEnergySaver software, to control the cellular network interface in a personalized manner to save smartphone energy. According to our findings, more than 30% smartphone energy can be saved without impacting the user-perceived QoE.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / As mobile computing becomes more ubiquitous, through the use of very capable mobile computing devices and broadband wide area wireless data networks, naval aviation maintenance has an opportunity to extend the reach of the Naval Aviation Logistics Command Management Information System (NALCOMIS) to fielded aircrew, maintenance technicians, and maintenance supervisors supporting out of local area operations. The combination of the new mobile technologies and the wireless Internet makes modern Mobile Business (m-business) initiatives possible but ushers in a host of new problems and issues that are radically different from those experienced with traditional fixed electronic business (e-business) projects. This thesis examines the concept and components that comprise m-business, details wide area data over cellular technologies, and identifies problems and issues unique to m-business initiatives. Scenario-based Use Cases will be employed within the Unified Process (UP) framework to develop the three major artifacts of the UP's inception phase - the project's vision, a Use Case model, and a supplemental specification containing functional and non-functional requirements for an aircrew mobile aircraft maintenance application. The results of this study can serve as the foundation for the development of a complete mobile aircraft maintenance office. / Lieutenant Commander, United States Navy

Telecommunication service providers have recently begun to offer ubiquitous access to packetised data. As a result, the Internet is not limited to computers that are physically connected but is also available to users that axe equipped with mobile devices. This ubiquitous access fuels the growth and the usage of the Internet even further, and thus the realisation of dynamic Internet. With the realisation of the dynamic Internet, increasing support is needed for Internet protocol (IP) and transmission control protocol (TCP) over wireless/mobile networks.Two areas of interest in this thesis are unicast and multicast routing in connectionless and connection-oriented networks. To address the problems of routing protocols in mobile computing environments, the active networks (ANs) paradigm is employed. ANs provide an alternative paradigm to solving network problems and comprise programmable network elements that allow enhancement of existing protocols and the execution of active protocols which run for the duration of the communication session.This thesis investigates the viability and advantages of ANs when applied to routing in mobile communications. Two new AN-based protocols, for IP and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks, that address the problems of multicast routing with mobile group members are outlined. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) mobile IP has been augmented with active programs in order to enhance its operation further. Also, a novel model for rerouting connections in ATM networks is presented.Results of extensive simulation studies comparing performances of conventional as well as some recently proposed protocols with those of AN-based protocols are presented. The results obtained from these simulation studies show that AN-based protocols have the following benefits: (i) efficient adaptation to mobility, (ii) reduced signaling overheads, ++ / (iii) high reuse of allocated network states, (iv) extensibility, (v) network topology independence, and (vi) scalability. The aforementioned points are crucial in mobile environments where states at routers (switches) are frequently updated due to mobility. It was shown that ANs provide the most benefits to protocols that maintain states within the network, for example connection-oriented and multicast protocols. AN-based protocols enable fast and efficient update of the states maintained at the routers/switches without incurring excessive signaling overheads. Moreover, part of a connection or multicast tree can be updated iteratively with the use of ANs, resulting only in modifications to routers (switches) that are affected by host migration. A model for deploying active programs that is coupled with the protocol operation is also demonstrated. Implementation of such a model eliminates the need for strategic positioning of active services.

Thesis (M.S. in Information Technology Management)--Naval Postgraduate School, March 2003. / Thesis advisor(s): Norman F. Schneidewind, Douglas E. Brinkley. Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-102). Also available online.