Self-addressing for Autonomous Networking Systems

Autoconfiguration is an important functionality pursued by research in the contexts of dynamic ad hoc and next generation of networks. Autoconfiguration solutions span across all architectural layers and range from network configuration to applications, and also implement cross-layer concepts. In networking, the addressing system plays a fundamental role as long as hosts must be uniquely identified. A proper identification is the base for other network operations, such as routing and security issues. Due to its importance, addressing is a challenging problem in dynamic and heterogeneous networks, where it becomes more complex and critical. This chapter presents a review and considerations for addressing autoconfiguration, focusing on the addressing procedure. Several self-addressing solutions for autonomous networks are surveyed, covering a wide range of possible methodologies. These solutions are also categorized according to the methodology they implement, their statefulness, and the way they deal with addresses duplication and/or conflicts. Special considerations regarding conformity to IPv6 are also presented.

Pervasive Applications in the Aged Care Service

This chapter presents a case study about the adoption of a wireless handheld care management system at an aged care facility in Victoria, Australia. The research evaluated the motivation for adoption and usefulness of the system in collecting patient data. It employed a qualitative technique to gather insights from two perspectives: operations staff as end users and management as strategic decision makers. These findings indicate conflicting views in terms of the usefulness of the pervasive application by the operations staff and the significance of this IT investment by senior management. Based on the understanding that IT investment often cannot be measured solely in monetary terms, the authors propose the use of the Balanced Scorecard approach to systematically evaluate the performance of the pervasive application in aged care facilities as such.

Privacy in Pervasive Systems

Data protection legislation has developed in a digital communication context that is changing dramatically. Infrastructure-based, networked systems are increasingly interconnecting and interoperating with infrastructure-less or even spontaneous networks, which are important elements of pervasive systems. These are also characterized by an autonomic, self-managed behavior that undermines the role of central management entities such as network and service providers. In this context, meeting the demanding requirements of privacy laws becomes a serious challenge, because once the user’s data crosses a managed boundary, it is impossible to clearly determine and transfer responsibilities. This chapter revisits the important elements of privacy regulations with the purpose of highlighting the hurdles posed onto pervasive systems. The analysis in this chapter indentifies imperative research and technological issues.

Secure Electronic Healthcare Records Distribution in Wireless Environments Using Low Resource Devices

The continuous growth of wireless technologies introduces a paradigm shift in the way information may be treated. Especially in the medical domain, Information Systems may gain benefits from the utilization of wireless devices which gain continuously in terms of resources. Existing legislation in US and EU countries introduces a lot of new challenges. Above all else, the information exchanged should be encrypted, and verified to reach the intended recipient. The authors of this chapter discuss the challenges hindering the efforts to disseminate in an accurate and secure manner medical information over wireless infrastructures. They present based on the results of two projects partially funded by the EU, an architecture that allows secure dissemination of electronic healthcare records. The chapter presents the architecture based on software agent technologies and enables query and authentication mechanisms in a transparent to the user manner. The chapter also discusses the security oriented choices of the approach and argues based on experimentation that the architecture efficiently supports a sufficient number of users.

Level Crossing Sampling for Energy Conservation in Wireless Sensor Networks

In periodic sampling of the bandlimited signals, many of the consecutive samples are very similar and sometimes the signal remains unchanged over periods of time. These samples can be interpreted as redundant. For this, transmission of all of the periodic samples from all of the sensors in wireless sensor networks is wasteful. The problem becomes more challenging in large scale wireless sensor networks. Level crossing sampling in time is proposed for energy conservation in real-life application of wireless sensor networks to increase the network lifetime by avoiding the transmission of redundant samples. In this chapter, a design framework is discussed for application of level crossing sampling in wireless sensor networks. The performance of level crossing sampling for various level definition schemes are evaluated using computer simulations and experiments with real-life wireless sensors.

Pervasive and Interactive Use of Multimedia Contents via Multi-Technology Location-Aware Wireless Architectures

Nowadays, due to the increasing demands of the fast-growing Consumer Electronics (CEs) market, more powerful mobile consumer devices are being introduced continuously; thanks to this evolution of CEs technologies, many sophisticated pervasive applications start to be developed and applied to context and location aware scenarios. This chapter explores applications and a real world case-study of pervasive computing by means of a flexible communication architecture well suited for the interactive enjoyment of historical and artistic contents and built on top of a wireless network infrastructure. The designed system and the implemented low cost testbed integrate different communication technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS with the aim of offering, in a transparent and reliable way, a mixed set of different multimedia and Augmented Reality (AR) contents to mobile users equipped with handheld devices. This communication architecture represents a first solid step to provide network support to pervasive context-aware applications pushing the ubiquitous computing paradigm into reality.

Socio-technical Factors in the Deployment of Participatory Pervasive Systems in Non-Expert Communities

This chapter discusses the design and development of an interactive mobile tourist guide system according to the principles of Pervasive Computing laid out by Hansmann (2004) and presents solutions to the technical issues encountered in the development of a multi-tiered system that encompasses a wide ecology of devices. The chapter further presents the non-technical issues encountered during a live trial of the system and uses the experience gathered from this deployment to present evidence that Hansmann’s (2004) four principles require the addition of a fifth principle, which is defined and based on hedonic values. In this view, the latter are crucial to the successful adoption of mobile and pervasive systems.

A Platform for Pervasive Building Monitoring Services Using Wireless Sensor Networks

At the core of pervasive computing model, small, low cost, robust, distributed, and networked processing devices are placed, which are thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have emerged as pervasive computing technology enablers in several field, including environmental monitoring and control. Using this technology as a pervasive computing approach, researchers have been trying to persuade people to be more aware of their environment and energy usage in the course of their every day life. WSNs have brought significant benefits as far as monitoring is concerned, since they are more efficient and flexible compared to wired sensor solutions. In this chapter, the authors propose a Service Oriented Architecture for developing an enterprise networking environment used for integrating enterprise level applications and building management systems with other operational enterprise services and functions for the information sharing and monitoring, controlling, and managing the enterprise environment. The WSN is viewed as an information service provider not only to building management systems but also to wider applications in the enterprise infrastructure. The authors also provide specification, implementation, and deployments of the proposed architecture and discuss the related tests, experimentations, and evaluations of the architecture.

Context-Aware Smartphone Services

The contribution of this chapter is to propose a survey of several methods to extract context information, by employing a smartphone, based on Digital Signal Processing and Pattern Recognition approaches, aimed at answering to the following questions about the user’s surroundings: what, who, where, when, why and how. It represents a fundamental part of the overall process needed to provide a complete context-aware service.

Querying Issues in Pervasive Environments

The main objective of this chapter is to present a general overview of existing approaches on query processing and the authors’ vision on query evaluation in pervasive environments. It illustrates, with scenarios and practical examples, existing data and streams querying systems in pervasive environments. It describes the evaluation process of (i) mobile queries and queries on moving objects, (ii) continuous queries and (iii) stream queries. Finally, the chapter introduces the authors’ vision of query processing as a service composition in pervasive environments.