Special Theme

Cover of ERCIM News 93

ERCIM News 93

April 2013

Special theme Mobile Computing

Guest editors Edgar Weippl (SBA Research, AARIT, Austria) and Pietro Manzoni (Universitat Politècnica de Valéncia, SpaRCIM)

PDF ePub 60 pages

In this issue

Browse recent issues

Browse all issues

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 11082

by Edgar Weippl and Pietro Manzoni

A few years ago, the IT industry forecast that consumer demand for data would surpass that of the voice market. At the time, few could conceptualize such an outlook. These days the data market is at least 70% larger than the mobile market, and still growing. Mobile technology has advanced in leaps and bounds over recent years, such that experts predict that, within the next few years, mobile computing will be strictly bound to cloud computing. Mobile cloud computing is set to impact and transform the mobile communication landscape and the whole computing infrastructure. Computing offloading, for example, is one of the main features of mobile computing to improve the battery life of mobile devices and to improve the performance of applications. However, there are many associated issues to solve, including efficient and dynamic offloading in a variable environment.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 9275

by Matthias Steinbauer, Ismail Khalil and Gabriele Kotsis

During any social interaction, nonverbal social signals convey just as much information as the conversation itself. While transmitting and analysing conversation is quite a common task for machines, the transmission and analysis of social signals is not. The convergence of cloud computing and mobile computing leads to a situation where insight into social systems is possible, thus paving the way for exciting new applications.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 7394

by Francisco Barcelo-Arroyo, Israel Martin-Escalona and Marc Ciurana-Adell

The ability to pinpoint a terminal’s position is useful for many applications of mobile computing and for network optimization (eg handovers, tariffs, resource management). A range of techniques are available to obtain a terminal’s position [1]. GPS, for example, is used externally to the network and achieves good accuracy outdoors, with the trade off of increased energy consumption. Communication devices, however, are frequently used indoors, connecting to private networks, such as WLAN. Since GPS is inaccurate indoors owing to signal blockage and multipath errors, further research on indoors localization through communication networks is required. Mobile computing is linked to indoors positioning in applications such as: aged care, remote health control and security of buildings such as hospitals.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 8902

by Engin Kirda

The Android operating system is a burgeoning platform for deploying mobile applications to users, with more than 550,000 activations per day and an approximate 75% share of the global smartphone market that eclipses the once-dominant Apple iOS [1,3]. This trend is expected to continue, considering that Android's liberal licensing structure, open development environment, wide adoption across multiple hardware manufacturers and carriers, and modern end-user experience make it an attractive platform for both civilian and military use.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 8617

by Gianluigi Folino and Francesco Sergio Pisani

We present a framework for generating decision-tree based models that take automatic decisions on the offloading of mobile applications onto a cloud computing platform using an algorithm based on the genetic programming (GP) approach.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 10340

by Carmela Comito, Deborah Falcone, Domenico Talia and Paolo Trunfio

Data mining is emerging as a promising topic in mobile computing environments. We have defined a distributed architecture in which mobile devices cooperate in a peer-to-peer style to perform a data mining process, tackling the problem of energy capacity shortage by distributing the energy consumption among the available devices. An energy-aware (EA) scheduling strategy assigns data mining tasks over a network of mobile devices optimizing energy usage. The main design principle is to find a task allocation that prolongs the network residual life by balancing the energy load among the devices.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 9137

by Rolf Adelsberger and Gerhard Tröster

We present our wireless solution to device synchronization, control and real-time feedback for small and light-weight Inertial Measurement Units, (IMUs). The controller is implemented on a smartphone. We base a custom application layer on the protocol layer implemented on a low-power radio chip by ANT+TM. Our system is capable of synchronized (< 15 μsec) control of an arbitrary number of sensors (ETHOS), streaming data for real-time visualization and it reduces power consumption compared to other approaches.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 8619

by Georgios Larkou, Panayiotis Andreou, Andreas Konstantinidis and Demetrios Zeinalipour-Yazti

SmartLab is a first-of-a-kind open cloud of smartphones that enables a new line of systems-oriented mobile computing research.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 7191

by Mattias Jacobsson, Stina Nylander and Ylva Fernaeus

Mobile ActDresses is a design concept that utilizes existing practices of accessorizing, customization and manipulation of a physical mobile device to predict and control the behaviour of its software. Existing smartphone technology can be augmented by taking inspiration from existing practices in relation to costume, jewellery, personalization and fashion.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 8689

by Gerard Hoekstra and Rob van der Mei

The spectacular growth of mobile internet on smartphones and tablet computers has boosted the demand for fast wireless networks. By 2015, mobile data exchange is expected to be 26 times larger than it was in 2010 [1]. In the first six months of 2012, the mobile internet traffic volume in the Netherlands was 21% higher than that recorded in the last six months of 2011 [2]. A highly promising means to meet the increasing demand is to take advantage of the fact that many geographical areas are covered by a multitude of overlapping networks. This phenomenon is referred to as concurrent access (CA). CWI and technology company Thales Nederland B.V. have developed new methods to make efficient use of the possibilities of CA by developing and implementing smart algorithms to split traffic over the multitude of wireless access networks.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 9441

by Carlos E. Cuesta, Paloma Cáceres, Belén Vela and José María Cavero

Mobile systems are becoming ubiquitous, which, in combination with wide-range service-oriented architectures, offers enormous potential for a range of uses. In this context, we have developed the CoMobility platform, a system designed to integrate carpooling and the use of public transport networks, with the goal of reducing energy consumption and CO2 emissions. CoMobility defines a service-oriented platform to help mobile users plan their use of transport, including sharing, with the purpose of saving both energy and money.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 17341

by Katarzyna Wac

Quality of Service Information System (QoSIS) focuses on measurement-based performance evaluation of wireless access networks provided by diverse mobile network operators in diverse locations and times. We have developed an Android OS mobile application that uses measurement data provided by real mobile users living in the Geneva area to predict the networks' expected performance. Measurement data, and therefore predictions, are available for Swiss operators: Swisscom, Sunrise, Orange CH, as well as French operators: SFR, Bouygtel and Virgin.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 7987

by Marco Conti, Franca Delmastro and Andrea Passarella

Pervasive networking devices, including mobile devices, generate an environment saturated by heterogeneous hardware and software resources. Novel mobile computing paradigms allow this environment to be organized and orchestrated. “Opportunistic computing” is a new approach that allows applications to take advantage of self-organizing services built, in a dynamic way, out of the mobile resources that are available in pervasive environments.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 19289

by Licia Capra, Pierre Chatel, Animesh Pathak and Roberto Speicys Cardoso

European researchers and companies join hands to address the woes of the urban traveller.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 14469

by Nicolas Haderer, Romain Rouvoy, Christophe Ribeiro and Lionel Seinturier

The rapid emergence of mobile devices, such as TabletPC and smartphones, equipped with a rich array of sensors, enables a new means of acquiring sensor data, known as crowd-sensing. Crowd-sensing is currently receiving a lot of attention, not only from industry but also from various research communities interested in collecting a new class of data over a much larger population than was previously possible.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 13555

by Jagdish Prasad Achara, Franck Baudot, Claude Castelluccia, Geoffrey Delcroix and Vincent Roca

Who, do you think, is aware of almost everything you do? Well, it’s probably right there in your pocket, if you own a smartphone and carry it with you. In order to evaluate the actual privacy risks of smartphones and to raise public awareness of these risks, the CNIL (French data protection authority) and the Inria (French public science and technology institution dedicated to computational sciences) Privatics team started working together in 2012 as part of the Mobilitics project.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 7162

by Gianpiero Costantino, Fabio Martinelli and Paolo Santi

We present an implementation of the FairPlay framework for secure two-party function computation on Android smartphones, which we call MobileFairPlay. Our application was developed to preserve the users’ privacy within opportunistic networks considering the interest-casting model. Our tests show that the running times of the protocol on several Android phones, are very reasonable (up to five seconds in the worst case).

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 6735

by Gabriele Costa, Alessio Merlo and Luca Verderame

We present a security-enabled application marketplace that provides formal security guarantees to the existing mobile software distribution paradigm. Our proposal allows users and organizations to apply fine-grained security policies on top of the existing market-based software deployment with no need for invasive customization of devices and without compromising the system scalability and usability.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 6972

by Mathieu Cunche, Mohamed Ali Kaafar and Roksana Boreli

Wi-Fi technology, available in the vast majority of mobile phones, tablets, laptops and other computing devices that we use in our daily lives, has enabled widespread use of new applications and services. This technology, however, has a number of issues related to privacy loss, exacerbated by its ubiquity. Our research shows how the information freely transmitted by the Wi-Fi protocol can be used to identify links between people, ie whether they are family, friends, colleagues etc.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 8584

by Abdessamad Imine and Michaël Rusinowitch

Designing secure collaborative applications has become a hot topic in the area of mobile devices, posing challenging problems such as data management and security.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 6976

by Jonáš Ševčík

The ability to easily access your location along with additional relevant information has emerged over the last six years with the rapid development of the smartphone industry. The trend of using mobile phones to get a sense of location is now one of the main features of these devices. Most outdoor tracking is done by the Global Positioning System (GPS), but what are one’s options if one is indoors, where you cannot use the GPS signal?

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 16446

by Christos Laoudias, Georgios Larkou, Demetrios Zeinalipour-Yazti and Christos G. Panayiotou

The wide availability of location data is undoubtedly reshaping the entire smartphone ecosystem with the advent of innovative location-aware services and applications. To accelerate their adoption by the public, the Airplace positioning system is a location-enabling platform that aims to deliver highly reliable and accurate location information right where the highest demand is anticipated in the near future: inside buildings.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 6417

by Imad Afyouni, Cyril Ray and Christophe Claramunt

Despite the continuous development and improvements made in mobile computing and the variety of technologies that can be used to enable ambient indoor environments, there are still many research challenges in this area that need to be addressed. Spatial data representation and management as well as location-dependent query processing are among current issues to be coped with so that an efficient and sufficiently flexible indoor context-aware navigation system can be designed.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 10915

by João Falcão e Cunha, Teresa Galvão and Jeremy Pitt

Research at the School of Engineering of the University of Porto and Imperial College London has been investigating how smartphones will enable you to enjoy the experience of travelling in a bus.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 8588

by Marino Linaje and Luis Miguel Dominguez-Peinado

Current technology, including smartphones, sensors and the Cloud can revolutionize traditional air pollution measurement. This article summarizes a novel approach focused on cost optimization, collaborative data capture, use of standards and public data distribution.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 7868

by Massimo Martinelli, Davide Moroni and Ovidio Salvetti

We believe that the contribution of volunteers could play a fundamental role in monitoring and protecting the environment. People at sea sighting pollution caused by oil or hydrocarbon spillages can now immediately report this using a freely downloadable mobile application.

Details: Category: Special Theme; Hits: 6119

by Damià Segrelles, Maite Giménez and Ignacio Blanquer

Intuitive interfaces of mobile devices facilitate the introduction of structured data in breast cancer management, leading to an increase of completeness and accuracy of diagnosis and follow-up evaluations, as well as opening the door for more effective content-based retrieval techniques for clinical decision support.