The dream of pervasive computing is slowly becoming a reality. A number of projects around the world are constantly contributing ideas and solutions that are bound to change the way we interact with our environments and with one another. An essential component of the future is a software infrastructure that is capable of supporting interactions on scales ranging from a single physical space to intercontinental collaborations. Such infrastructure must help applications adapt to very diverse environments and must protect people's privacy and respect their personal preferences. In this paper we indicate a number of limitations present in the software infrastructures proposed so far (including our previous work). We then describe the framework for building an infrastructure that satisfies the abovementioned criteria. This framework hinges on the concepts of delegation, arbitration and high-level service discovery. Components of our own implementation of such an infrastructure are presented.

Wireless devices and their services are becoming increasingly important for many people¡¦s lives. The services provided by these mobile devices enable users to work without space or time limitation. However, while these applications allow users to record and retrieve information about tasks and data, the relationships between tasks and data are left out. However, we have observed that many of people¡¦s daily activities are not independent, and they are likely to be process-oriented. In this thesis, we develop a personal workflow model that is used to capture the requirements of personal processes. This model also includes a set of primitive operations that can be used to express queries on personal processes. The algebraic properties about these operations and how to optimize queries comprised of these operations are studied. Based on these operations, we propose an SQL-like query language to ease users¡¦ query expressions. Besides, to actively remind the mobilers the right things to do at the right place and the right time, we propose a rule model that resembles event-condition-action (ECA) rules proposed for active database systems. All of the proposed features except for the rule model are implemented on Palm Pilot PDAs.

Pervasive Computing presents an exciting realm where intelligent devices interact within the background of our environments to create a more intuitive experience for their human users. We demonstrate enabling context-awareness through our creation of a standardized context-management framework. Our framework moves towards device intelligence by supporting context-awareness. Context-awareness is what gives devices the ability to understand and exchange information about each other. Context information is used to determine device purpose, capabilities, location, current state, and other properties. Several elements are required in order to achieve context-awareness, including a suitable ontology, a context model, and a middleware platform upon which to implement the context model. In this work, a complete context-management framework is presented and evaluated. We propose our own ontology specification and context model, and implement a middleware using the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) interoperability standard. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-09 14:51:30.242

Wireless and pervasive computing research continues to study ways the Internet of Things (IoT)<br />can make lives easier and more productive. Areas of interest include advances in new<br />architectures and frameworks that support large-scale IoT deployments beyond research<br />prototypes, simple and inexpensive human-to-device and device-to-device interfaces, and user<br />decision making support with opportunistic information services.<br /><br />This dissertation investigates the design and implementation of a general-purpose framework<br />upon which IoT and opportunistic computing (OC) systems can be built.<br /><br />The result of this work is Pebbles and Urns (P&U), a casually accessible system designed to<br />deliver information to a person that is pertinent and beneficial to them with respect to their<br />current activity, location and other contexts. P&U is a proximity-based information delivery<br />framework that leverages a simple, inexpensive tangible interface and context-rich, physicallysituated,<br />distributed information repositories. By its proposed use of enforced proximity, local<br />context, and location-specific services, P&U can support the situated interaction between user<br />and place.<br /><br />The P&U framework is based on a layered architecture consisting of an isolated physical<br />communication layer, a data repository supporting opportunistic service composition and<br />delivery, and a controller/interface providing user feedback. Serving as a potential IoT design<br />pattern, P&U application developers can use the framework API\'s and software tools to build<br />and deploy P&U systems.<br /><br />As validation of this work, P&U prototypes are constructed using the framework, API\'s and<br />software tools. The prototypes are based on use cases depicting a person engaged in the day-today<br />activities of attending class, going to the gym and grocery shopping. Performance<br />measurements are performed on the prototypes profiling core components of the framework.<br />Results indicate proper functioning of P&U tangible interfaces, communication connections,<br />service request and delivery, and internal framework operations.<br /><br />Contributions of this research include a general-purpose framework, a simple IoT interface and<br />an opportunistic engine. / Ph. D.

This thesis focuses on an Agent-Based Service-Oriented approach to evolving legacy system into a Pervasive Computing environment. The methodology consists of multiple phases: using reverse engineering techniques to comprehend and decompose legacy systems, employing XML and Web Services to transform and represent a legacy system as pervasive services, and integrating these pervasive services into pervasive computing environments with agent based integration technology. A legacy intelligent building system is used as a case study for experiments with the approach, which demonstrates that the proposed approach has the ability to evolve legacy systems into pervasive service environments seamlessly. Conclusion is drawn based on analysis and further research directions are also discussed.

Mobile devices are generally less powerful and more resource constrained than their desktop counterparts are, yet many of the applications that are of the most value to users of mobile devices are resource intensive and difficult to support on a mobile device. Applications such as games, video playback, image processing, voice recognition, and facial recognition are resource intensive and often exceed the limits of mobile devices. Cyber foraging is an approach that allows a mobile device to discover and utilize surrogate devices present in the local environment to augment the capabilities of the mobile device. Cyber foraging has been shown to be beneficial in augmenting the capabilities of mobile devices to conserve power, increase performance, and increase the fidelity of applications. The cyber foraging scheduler determines what operation to execute remotely and what surrogate to use to execute the operation. Virtually all cyber foraging schedulers in use today utilize historical data in the scheduling algorithm. If historical data about a surrogate is unavailable, execution history must be generated before the scheduler's algorithm can utilize the surrogate. The period between the arrival time of a surrogate and when historical data become available is called the cold-start state. The cold-start state delays the utilization of potentially beneficial surrogates and can degrade system performance. The major contribution of this research was the extension of a historical-based prediction algorithm into a low-overhead estimation-enhanced algorithm that eliminated the cold-start state. This new algorithm performed better than the historical and random scheduling algorithms in every operational scenario. The four operational scenarios simulated typical use-cases for a mobile device. The scenarios simulated an unconnected environment, an environment where every surrogate was available, an environment where all surrogates were initially unavailable and surrogates joined the system slowly over time, and an environment where surrogates randomly and quickly joined and departed the system. One future research possibility is to extend the heuristic to include storage system I/O performance. Additional extensions include accounting for architectural differences between CPUs and the utilization of Bayesian estimates to provide metrics based upon performance specifications rather than direct

How people come to trust computing technology is an important factor in the degree to which they come to accept the services that such technologies are able to provide. This is particularly important where the usage of a technology might risk compromising a person’s private information, making them vulnerable to technologically mediated attack. Research into interpersonal trust development between people has allowed designers of systems deployed using technologies such as the World Wide Web to successfully modulate a number of human interpersonal trust cues into the computer-mediated communication domain. Pervasive computing however, describes a significant shift in the ways in which people will come to encounter and use interactive technologies. No longer limited to the confines of the desktop, people can and will be able to perform many of the technological activities they would otherwise do at home in any place and at any time. However, while the services that a pervasive computing infrastructure will be able to provide may be similar to those that people are used to in the traditional world of the ‘desktop metaphor’, the novel characteristics of pervasive computing mean that many of the trust cues that were previously available to technology users may no longer offer an effective means of helping users to place their trust well. In this thesis, a mixed methods research plan, involving both laboratory-based and field-based experimental design, was developed to investigate the role of human-computer trust in respect of two novel characteristics of pervasive computing: service discovery and secure ad-hoc device association. Through leveraging various artefacts in the immediate physical world to support information presented by services in the digital world, this thesis posits that the provision of user-verifiable links between the physical and digital worlds might provide a means of increasing user trust in services whose source they can otherwise not perceive nor verify.

The System Architecture for Tracking Individuals (SAFTI) is an indoor person location tracking system designed for use in the field of pervasive computing. SAFTI provides location tracking in environments where cameras are too privacy invasive, where tracking devices are too costly, insecure or inconvenient, and where usability is a high priority. While many location tracking systems satisfy each of these constraints individually, SAFTI satisfies all three constraints simultaneously. Upon entering and exiting SAFTI buildings, users submit identification credentials. Once inside the building, using SAFTI is effortless - simply passing through doorways is sufficient for supplying SAFTI with the information it needs to perform location tracking. An integral part of SAFTI is the Weakly Identifying System for Doorway Monitoring (WISDOM). These instrumented doorways contain a variety of infrared, ultrasonic and pressure sensors that detect the direction of passage and measure each user's body size and shape. We quantify the measurement and identification accuracy of WISDOM by analyzing data collected from a user study containing 530 passes through a WISDOM prototype from 10 different subjects. We combine the results from WISDOM with large publicly available anthropometric databases to evaluate how accurately SAFTI performs location tracking with respect to building size, density of occupants, and matching algorithm used. / Dissertation

In today’s world, technology is growing at a fast rate compared at other times. Sales have increased in the smart phone market, which has created new opportunities in pervasive computing. In pervasive computing, nodes enter and leave a network at any time. Within the network, nodes can transfer data to other nodes. The information is not retained in any static location such as a server. The mobile infrastructure requires a way to handle all the information in a dynamic way. The use of a centralized server in a mobile environment creates deterioration in the performance of obtaining information. The main goal of this paper is to provide data persistence using a “substrate” that is inherently not persistent. The data will be stored within the network for availability to all users. Saving data within a network would provide a means to obtain any type of information without relying on the source of where the data came from in the network. Users would also be able to continue downloading where they left off when they return to the network. Consider an environment where people can share music or books. For example, say that John Doe was searching for a particular song to download and in the network Jane has the song that was requested. John decides to download the song without knowing that it is from Jane. Then John decides to leave the network and the download stops. Whenever John rejoins the network the download of his song will continue where he left off, and his ability to access the information will not depend whether or not Jane is present in the network. John may retrieve the file from any other user who has the exact same file. The requested information that the user queries in a search engine will be stored as a metadata within the network, either by other nodes or a temporary server. This allows data to be obtained without relying on the "main user" or creator of the data to be present in the network. The users would also be able to retrieve the data at multiple times. / text

Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) is a compelling vision for how people will interact with multiple computer systems in the course of their daily lives. To date, practitioners have created a variety of infrastructures, middleware and toolkits to provide the flexibility, ease of programming and the necessary coordination of distributed software and hardware components in physical spaces. However, to-date no one approach has been adopted as a default or de-facto standard. Consequently the field risks losing momentum as fragmentation occurs. In particular, the goal of ubiquitous deployments may stall as groups deploy and trial incompatible point solutions in specific locations. In their defense, researchers in the field argue that it is too early to standardize and that room is needed to explore specialized domain-specific solutions. In the absence of an agreed upon set of standards, we argue that the community must consider a methodology that allows systems to evolve and specialize, while at the same time allowing the development of portable applications and integrated deployments that work between between sites. To address this we studied the programming models of many commercial and research ubicomp systems. Through this survey we gained an understanding of the shared abstractions required in a core programming model suitable for both application portability and systems integration. Based on this study we designed an extensible core model called the Ubicomp Common Model (UCM) to describe a representative sample of ubiquitous systems to date. The UCM is instantiated in a flexible and extensible platform called the Ubicomp Integration Framework (UIF) to adapt ubicomp systems to this model. Through application development and integration experience with a composite campus environment, we provide strong evidence that this model is adequate for application development and that the complexity of developing adapters to several representative systems is not onerous. The performance overhead introduced by introducing the centralized UIF between applications and an integrated system is reasonable. Through careful analysis and the use of well understood approaches to integration, this thesis demonstrates the value of our methodology that directly leverages the significant contributions of past research in our quest for ubicomp application and systems interoperability.