A Picture and a Thousand Words

Mobile communication is a key enabler for economic, social, and political change in developing regions of the world. This paper describes IBM Picture Discussions, which is a mobile social computing application framework designed to facilitate local information sharing in regions with sparse Internet connectivity, low literacy rates, and having users with little prior experience with information technology. IBM Picture Discussions runs on today’s internet-enabled smartphones as well as camera phones with multimedia messaging. In this paper, the authors argue that engaging citizens in developing regions in information creation and information sharing leverages peoples’ existing social networks to facilitate transmission of critical information, exchange of ideas, and distributed problem solving. All of these activities can support economic development.

Annotation and Auto-Scrolling for Web Page Overview in Mobile Web Browsing

Due to advances in mobile phones, mobile Web browsing has become increasingly popular. In this regard, small screens and poor input capabilities of mobile phones prevent users from comfortably browsing Web pages that are designed for desktop PCs. One of the serious problems of mobile Web browsing is that users often get lost in a Web page and can only view a small portion of a Web page at a time, not able to grasp the entire page’s structure to decide which direction their information of interest is located. To solve this problem, an effective technique is to present an overview of the page. Although prior studies adopted the conventional style of overview, that is, a scaled-down image of the page, this is not sufficient because users cannot see details of the contents. Therefore, in this paper, the authors present annotations on a Web page that provides a functionality which automatically scrolls the page. Results of a user experiment show that annotations are informative for users who want to find contents from a large Web page.

Effect of Personal Innovativeness, Attachment Motivation and Social Norms on the Acceptance of Camera Mobile Phones

This study develops a model to assess the consumer acceptance of Camera Mobile Phone (CMP) technology for social interaction. While there has been considerable research on technology adoption in the workplace, far fewer studies have been done to understand the motives of technology acceptance for social use. To fill in this gap, the authors develop a model that is based on the theory of the technology acceptance model, the theory of reasoned action, the attachment motivation theory, innovation diffusion theory, and the theory of flow. The first research methods used was a qualitative field study that identified the variables that most drive CMP acceptance and build the research model using a sample of 83 consumers. The second method was a quantitative field study, which collected from a sample of 240 consumers in Kuwait in order to test the model. Results reveal the “social use” and “use before shopping” uses, explaining 32.3% and 30% of the variance, respectively. Most importantly, the study reveals that personal innovativeness, attachment motivation, and social norms have an important effect on CMP acceptance.

On Balancing Energy Consumption, Rendering Speed, and Image Quality on Mobile Devices

Mobile games and graphics are popular because un-tethered computing is convenient and ubiquitous entertainment is compelling. However, rendering graphics on mobile devices faces challenges due to limited system resources, such as battery energy, and low memory and disk space. Real time frame rates, low energy consumption and high image quality are all desirable attributes of interactive mobile graphics; however, achieving these objectives is conflicting. For instance, increasing mesh resolutions improves rendered image quality but consumes more battery energy. Therefore, the authors propose a mobile graphics heuristic to minimize energy consumption while maintaining acceptable image quality and interactive frame rates. Over the lifetime of a mobile graphics application, scene complexity, animation paths, user interactivity and other elements all change its CPU and resource demands. In this regard, a heuristic that dynamically changes scene mesh LoDs and amount of CPU timeslices allotted to the mobile graphics application is presented to select optimal operating conditions that balance rendering speed, energy conservation and image quality. Additionally, a workload predict model is proposed so that the heuristic can monitor both application workload and the availability of resources of mobile devices periodically, while adaptively determining how much resources will be allocated to applications.

A Collaborative Replication Approach for Mobile-P2P Networks

This paper proposes CADRE (Collaborative Allocation and De-allocation of Replicas with Efficiency), which is a dynamic replication scheme for improving the typically low data availability in dedicated and cooperative mobile ad-hoc peer-to-peer (M-P2P) networks. In particular, replica allocation and de-allocation are collaboratively performed in tandem to facilitate effective replication. Such collaboration is facilitated by a hybrid super-peer architecture in which some of the mobile hosts act as the ‘gateway nodes’ (GNs) in a given region. GNs facilitate both search and replication. The main contributions of CADRE are as follows. First, it facilitates the prevention of ‘thrashing’ conditions due to its collaborative replica allocation and de-allocation mechanism. Second, it considers the replication of images at different resolutions to optimize the usage of the generally limited memory space of the mobile hosts (MHs). Third, it addresses fair replica allocation across the MHs. Fourth, it facilitates the optimization of the limited energy resources of MHs during replication. The authors’ performance evaluation demonstrates that CADRE is indeed effective in improving data availability in M-P2P networks with significant reduction in query response times and low communication traffic during replication as compared to a recent existing scheme as well as a baseline approach, which does not consider any replication.

Mobile Multimedia Streaming Using Secure Multipath in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Supporting reliable and secure multimedia streaming service is a challenging task in the environment of wireless Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) where radio signals are prone to security attacks and the quality of media streaming is degraded by signal strength loss and interference. The mobility of mobile devices makes streaming even more difficult as communication links are often broken when the devices move out of the transmission range of their neighbors. This paper proposes a stable multipath routing algorithm and an intelligent secure data distribution scheme for multimedia streaming in MANETs. The multipath Neighbor Stability Routing is able to find more stable and long-lasting paths than traditional ad hoc routing algorithms. The secure data distribution takes historical data-path distribution into consideration and maximally disperses new multimedia data to reduce the possibility of information leakage to unauthorized parties. The authors’ simulation and analysis indicate that the combination of these two mechanisms can provide high quality paths to achieve secure multimedia streaming.

Peer Assist Live Streaming Overlay for Next-Generation-Networks

The rapid evolution of the telecommunication domain increases the performance of different access networks continuously. New services, especially in the domain multimedia content distribution, require higher and higher bandwidth at the user’s and service provider’s side. Multimedia services like Video on Demand, IPTV, and live streaming were introduced in the past and are still improved in quality and quantity. Multimedia streams and Peer to Peer (P2P) file sharing dominates the worldwide Internet traffic nowadays and will continue further (Schulze, 2009). The user acceptance of enjoying multimedia content over the Internet will grow steadily together with the increasing quality of the available multimedia content. Network operators and service providers have to face the growths by increasing their service platform with higher performance and bandwidth or introducing a scalable solution. In this paper, the authors present an algorithm for scalable P2P live streaming in Next-Generation-Networks (NGN) that addresses this challenge. An evaluation proves the performance of the implementation of this algorithm in a demo scenario.

Session and Network Support for Autonomous Context-Aware Multiparty Communications in Heterogeneous Mobile Systems

The increase of networking complexity requires the design of new performance optimization schemes for delivering different types of sessions to users under different conditions. In this regard, special attention is given to multi-homed environments, where mobile devices cross areas with overlapping access technologies (Wi-Fi, 3G, WiMax). In such a scenario, efficient multiparty delivery depends upon the grouping operation, which must be done based on several parameters. In this paper, the authors propose context-aware sub-grouping of content-based service groups so that the same service session can be delivered using different codings of the same content, adapting to current network, users, session, and environment context. The context-aware information is used to improve the sub-grouping process. This paper aims to describe these sub-grouping techniques, and in particular how they improve network performance and user experience in the future Internet by focusing on the improved network-level and session-level mechanisms.

Contemporary Issues in Handheld Computing Research

Mobile phones have become ubiquitous in today’s society. However, mobile users are no longer satisfied with simple phones but instead expect ever more powerful functions to be available from their mobile devices. Advanced phones known as smartphones allow mobile users to perform a wide variety of advanced handheld functions such as browsing the mobile Internet or finding a nearby theater showing a specific movie. The design and development of these new, improved handheld functions require the help of handheld computing research. This article introduces handheld computing research using three themes: (i) mobile handheld devices, (ii) mobile computing, and (iii) current issues in handheld computing research. Information about other handheld topics of interest to researchers is given in the last section.

Indoor Positioning Using FM Radio

This paper presents an indoor positioning system based on FM radio. The system is built on commercially available short-range FM transmitters. This is the first experimental study of FM performance for indoor localisation. FM radio possesses a number of features, which make it distinct from other localisation technologies. Despite the low cost and off-the-shelf components, this FM positioning system reaches a high performance, comparable to other positioning technologies such as Wi-Fi. The authors’ experiments have yielded a median accuracy of 1.0 m and in 95% of cases the error is below 5 m.