Handbook of Research on Mobility and Computing: Evolving Technologies and Ubiquitous Impacts Maria Manuela Cruz-Cunha Polytechnic Institute of Cávado e Ave, Portugal Fernando Moreira Universidade Portucalense, Portugal
Volume I
INFORMATION SCIENCE REFERENCE Hershey • New York
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[email protected] Web site: http://www.igi-global.com Copyright © 2011 by IGI Global. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without written permission from the publisher. Product or company names used in this set are for identification purposes only. Inclusion of the names of the products or companies does not indicate a claim of ownership by IGI Global of the trademark or registered trademark. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Handbook of research on mobility and computing : evolving technologies and ubiquitous impacts / Maria Manuela Cruz-Cunha and Fernando Moreira, editors. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60960-042-6 (hbk.) -- ISBN 978-1-60960-043-3 (ebook) 1. Mobile computing. 2. Wireless communication systems. I. Cruz-Cunha, Maria Manuela, 1964- II. Moreira, Fernando, 1969 Aug. 16QA76.59.H35 2011 004.165--dc22 2010036723 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. All work contributed to this book is new, previously-unpublished material. The views expressed in this book are those of the authors, but not necessarily of the publisher.
Editorial Advisory Board Goran D. Putnik, University of Minho, Portugal João Varajão, University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal Joaquim Arnaldo Martins, Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal Nuno Lopes, Polytechnic Institute of Cávado e Ave, Portugal Patrícia Gonçalves, Polytechnic Institute of Cávado e Ave, Portugal Paulo Ferreira, INESC Porto, Portugal Vítor Carvalho, Polytechnic Institute of Cávado e Ave, Portugal
List of Reviewers Abdellah Touhafi, Erasmushogheschool, Belgium Abid Yahya, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia Abilio Azenha, ISR – Porto, Portugal Adriano Carvalho, ISR-Porto, Portugal Agostino Poggi, University of Parma, Italy An Braken, Erasmushogeschool, Belgium Ana Isabel González-Tablas, Univ. Carlos III of Madrid, Spain Ana María Fermoso García, Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain Andrea Zanda, Universidad Politecnica Madrid, Spain Andreas Ahrens, Hochschule Wismar - University of Technology, Germany Anselmo Cardoso de Paiva, University of the Maranhão, Brazil Antonio Foncubierta Rodriguez, University of Seville, Spain Aparecido Fabiano de Carvalho, University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland Arturo Molina, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico Aysegul Cayci, Sabanci University, Turkey Bahram Lotfisadigh, Middle East Technical University, USA Bart De Decker, K.U. Leuven, Belgium Bruno Kimura, University of São Paulo, Brazil C. Brad Crisp, Abilene Christian University, USA Carlo Bertolli, University of Pisa, Italy Carlos Ferras, University of Santiago, Spain
Carlos Quental, ESTV / IPV, Portugal Carmen Ruthenbeck, University of Bremen, Germany Castor Sánchez Chao, University of Vigo, Spain Célia Menezes, Escola Sec. Inf. D. Henrique, Portugal César Benavente-Peces, EUIT Telecomunicacion - Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain Chad Lin, Curtin University of Technology, Australia Chongming Zhang, Shanghai Normal University, China Cláudio de Souza Baptista, University of Campina Grande, Brazil Crescenzio Gallo, University of Foggia, Italy Cristiano Costa, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), Brazil Cristina Rodriguez-Sanchez, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain Daniel Câmara, EURECOM, France Daniele Buono, University of Pisa, Italy David Santos, Universidad San Pablo-CEU, Spain Dennis Viehland, Massey University, New Zeland Diana Bri, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Edson Moreira, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil Elena Nazzi, IT-University of Copenhagen, Denmark Emanuel Angelescu, RWTH, Germany Emanuel Correia, University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal Emanuel Soares Peres Correia, Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal Encarnación Beato Gutierrez, Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain Ernestina Menasalvas, Universitad Politecnica Madrid, Spain Ernesto Morales Kluge, BIBA, Gremany Fernando Lopez-Colino, UAM, Spain Fernando Moreira, Universidade Portucalense Infante D. Henrique, Portugal Florian Harjes, BIBA, Germany Francisco Rodríguez-Díaz, University of Granada, Spain Francisco Amaral, University of the Azores, Portugal Gabriele Mencagli, University of Pisa, Italy Gianluca Cornetta, Universidad San Pablo-CEU, Spain Gonzalo Aranda-Corral, University of Sevilla, Spain Greg Wilson, Virginia Tech, USA Gustavo Lermen, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), Brasil Hakki Unver, TOBB-ETU, USA Hamilton Turner, Vanderbilt University, USA Hassan Karimi, University of Pittsburgh, USA Heather Katz Hugo Coll, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Hugo Feitosa de Figueirêdo, University of Campina Grande, Brazil Ismael Bouassida Rodriguez, LAAS-CNRS, France Isidro Vila Verde, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, Portugal J. Stephanie Collins, Southern NH University, USA Jaime Lloret, Polytechnic University of Vale, Spain
Jairo Gutierrez, University of Auckland, New Zealand Javier Pereira Loureiro, University of A Coruna, Spain Jérôme Lacouture, LAAS-CNRS, France Jiaxiang Gan, University of Auckland, New Zealand João Barreto, Inesc-ID/UTL, Portugal João Bartolo Gomes, Universitad Politecnica Madrid, Spain João Carmo, University of Minho, Portugal João Eduardo Quintela Alves de Sousa Varajão, Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal João Rosa, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), Brazil Joaquim Arnaldo Martins, Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal Joaquín Borrego-Díaz, University of Sevilla, Spain Joaquim Sousa Pinto, Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal Jorge Ferreira, E-Geo FCSH, Portugal Jorge Luís Barbosa, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), Brazil José Colas, UAM, Spain José Delgado, Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal José Eustáquio Rangel de Queiroz, University of Campina Grande, Brazil José María De Fuentes, University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain José Maria Monguet-Fierro, UPC, Spain Juan Álvaro Muñoz Naranjo, Universidad de Almería, Spain Juan Antonio López Ramos, Universidad de Almería, Spain Juan Carlos González Moreno, University of Vigo, Spain Juan Hernandez-Tamames, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain Júlio cesar Melo, UFRN, Brazil Justo Peralta López, Universidad de Almería, Spain Kathryn Hayes, UWS, Australia Kelvin Bwalya, University of Botswana, Botswana Koong Lin, National University of Tainan, Taiwan Krassie Petrova, Auckland University of Technology, New Zeland Kris Steenhaut, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium Laerte Franco, Unisinos, Brazil Laura Nieto Riveiro, University of A Coruna, Spain Nuno Lopes, Polytechnic Institute of Cávado and Ave, Portugal Luca Vassena, University of Udine, Italy Luciana Arantes, LIP6/INRIA, France Luís Villaseñor, CICESE Research Centre, Mexico Luís Gouveia, Univ.Fernando Pessoa, Portugal Luís Peneda, ISR-Porto, Portugal Luís Serrano, Polithecnic Institute Leiria, Portugal Luís Veiga, INESC ID / Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal Luiz Marcos Gonçalves, UFRN, Brazil Mahsa Ghafourian, University of Pittsburgh, USA Mamun Abu-Tair, ECIT, UK Marco Vanneschi, University of Pisa, Italy
Marcus Bjelkemyr, The Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden Maria Borges Tiago, University of the Azores, Portugal Maria João Ferreira, Universidade Portucalense, Portugal Maria Manuela Cruz-Cunha, Polytechnic Institute of Cávado e Ave, Portugal Martin Stigmar, Växjö University, Sweden Mauro Onori, The Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden Maximino Esteves Correia Bessa, Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal Michael Decker, University of Karlsruhe, Germany Michael Williams, Pepperdine University, USA Michelangelo De Bonis, University of Foggia, Italy Michele Perilli, University of Foggia, Italy Michele Tomaiuolo, University of Parmaz, Italy Miguel Angel Sánchez Vidales, Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain Miguel Garcia, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Miguel Monteiro, Universidade do Porto, Portugal Milos Stojmenovic, University of Ottawa, Canada Montserrat Mateos Sánchez, Universidad Pontificia de Sala, Spain Nabeel Ahmad, IBM, USA Naoe Tatara, Norwegian Centre for Integrated Care and Telemedicine, Norway Natalia Padilla Zea, University of Granada, Spain Nicholas Pagden, Växjö University, Sweden Nikolaos Frangiadaki, University of Maryland, USA Nuno André Osório Liberato, Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal Nuno Flores, Universidade do Porto, Portugal Nuno Lau, Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal Nuno Lopes, Polytechnic Institute of Cávado e Ave, Portugal Nuno Veiga, IPLeiria, Portugal Patrícia Gonçalves, Polytechnic Institute of Cávado and Ave, Portugal Paula Vicente, ISCTE-IUL, Portugal Paulo Ferreira, INESC ID / IST, Portugal Pedro Campos, University of Madeira, Portugal Pethuru Raj Chelliah, Wipro Technologies, USA Pierre Kirisci, BIBA, Germany Pierre Sens, LIP6/INRIA, France Qixiang Pang, General Dynamics Canada, Canada Raúl Aquino, University of Colima, Mexico Riikka Vuokko, Åbo Akademi University, Finland Roberto Berjón Gallinas, Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain Roberto Yokoyama, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil Rubén Romero González, University of Vigo, Portugal Rui Rijo, IPLeiria, Portugal Rummenigge Dantas, UFRN, Brasil Sandra Sendra, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Santiago Eibe, Universitad Politecnica Madrid, Spain
Sílvio Bernardes, IPLeiria, Portugal Sohail Anwar, Penn State University, USA Thierry Desprats, IRIT, France Tom Chan, Southern NH University, USA Victor Gonzalez, University of Manchester, UK Víctor Rangel, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico Vincenzo Pallotta, University of Geneva, Switzerland Violeta Chirino-Barceló, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico Xinyu Lu, General Dynamics, Canada Yelena Zascerinska, University of Latvia, Republic of Latvia
List of Contributors
Abreu, Jorge / University of Aveiro, Portugal.................................................................................... 414 Ahmad, Nabeel / IBM Center for Advanced Learning, USA.............................................................. 871 Ahmad, R. Badlishah / Universiti Malaysia Perlis, Malaysia.......................................................... 157 Ahrens, Andreas / University of Technology, Business and Design, Germany.......................... 100, 760 Almeida, Margarida / University of Aveiro, Portugal....................................................................... 414 Almeida, Pedro / University of Aveiro, Portugal................................................................................ 414 Amaral, Francisco / University of the Azores, Portugal.................................................................... 327 Angelescu, Emanuel / Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH, Germany.................... 1226 Antunes, Maria / University of Aveiro, Portugal............................................................................... 414 Anwar, Sohail / Penn State University, USA...................................................................................... 237 Aquino, Raúl / University of Colima, México.................................................................................... 595 Aranda-Corral, Gonzalo / University of Sevilla, Spain.................................................................... 667 Arantes, Luciana / University Paris 6, France................................................................................ 1039 Arcangeli, Jean-Paul / Paul Sabatier University, France................................................................ 1056 Årsand, Eirik / Norwegian Centre for Integrated Care and Telemedicine, Norway.......................... 136 Astray, Loxo Lueiro / University of Vigo, Spain................................................................................ 445 Augustin, Iara / Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil ........................................................... 1077 Ayu, Media / International Islamic University Malaysia, Malaysia.......................................... 539, 558 Azevedo, Renato / Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil........................................................ 1077 Barbosa, Jorge / Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), Brazil..................................... 634 Barreto, João / INESC-ID/Technical University Lisbon, Portugal.......................................................1132 Bártolo Gomes, João / Universitad Politecnica, Spain...................................................................... 576 Bassus, Olaf / University of Technology, Business and Design, Germany......................................... 760 Benavente-Peces, César / Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain.............................................. 100 Bernardes, Silvio / IPLeiria, Portugal............................................................................................... 487 Bertolli, Carlo / University of Pisa, Italy............................................................................................ 617 Bjelkemyr, Marcus / The Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden...................................................... 821 Bonnet, Christian / EURECOM Sophia Antipolis, France........................................................ 267, 356 Borrego-Díaz, Joaquín / University of Sevilla, Spain........................................................................ 667 Borromeo, Susana / Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain................................................................ 472 Braeken, An / Erasmushogeschool Brussel, Belgium......................................................................... 930 Bri, Diana / Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain.................................................................... 1155 Buono, Daniele / University of Pisa, Italy.......................................................................................... 617
Burlamaqui, Aquiles / Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil................................ 397 Busch, Cristina Diaz / University of A Coruna, Spain..................................................................... 1169 Cabrera, Marcelino / University of Granada, Spain......................................................................... 368 Câmara, Daniel / EURECOM Sophia Antipolis, France........................................................... 267, 356 Campos, Pedro / University of Madeira, Portugal............................................................................ 793 Canovas, Alejandro / Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain...................................................... 426 Carmo, João Paulo / University of Minho, Portugal....................................................................... 1021 Cayci, Aysegul / Sabanci University, Turkey...................................................................................... 576 Cerquides Bueno, José Ramón / University of Seville, Spain......................................................... 1199 Chapman, Ross / Deakin University Melbourne, Australia................................................................. 65 Chassot, Christophe / Université de Toulouse, France................................................................... 1056 Chawla, Sheenu / SUSH Global Solutions, New Zealand.................................................................. 314 Chirino-Barceló, Violeta / Tecnologico de Monterrey Mexico, Mexico............................................ 774 Ciolfi, Luigina / University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland............................................................. 381 Colás, Jose / Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain....................................................................... 83 Coll, Hugo / Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain................................................................... 1155 Cornetta, Gianluca / Universidad San Pablo-CEU, Spain...................................................................... Cornetta, Gianluca / Universidad San Pablo-CEU, Spain........................................................ 930, 994 Correia, José Higino / University of Minho, Portugal..................................................................... 1021 Costa, Cristiano / Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), Brazil................................... 634 Costa, José / University Coimbra, Portugal....................................................................................... 703 Crisp, C. Brad / Abilene Christian University, USA........................................................................ 1213 Cunha, Maria / Pontificia Universidade Católica do PR, Brazil..................................................... 1091 da Silva, Tiago Eduardo / University of Campina Grande, Brazil.................................................. 1104 Dantas, Rummenigge / Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil............................... 397 de Bonis, Michelangelo / University of Foggia, Italy.......................................................................... 31 de Carvalho, Aparecido Fabiano Pinatti / University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland................. 381 de Decker, Bart / Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium............................................................. 1246 de Figueirêdo, Hugo Feitosa / University of Campina Grande, Brazil........................................... 1104 de Fuentes, José María / Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain..................................................... 894 de Paiva, Anselmo Cardoso / University of Maranhão, Brazil....................................................... 1104 de Queiroz, José Eustáquio Rangel / University of Campina Grande, Brazil................................ 1104 de Sousa Varajão, João Eduardo Quintela Alves / UTAD, Portugal.............................................. 881 de Souza Baptista, Cláudio / University of Campina Grande, Brazil............................................. 1104 Decker, Michael / Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany.............................................. 912 Delgado, Jose / Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal......................................................................... 853 Demetriou, Antonis / University of Manchester, UK....................................................................... 1262 Desprats, Thierry / Paul Sabatier University, France..................................................................... 1056 Dias, Ricardo / Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil............................................ 397 Dillenburg, Fabiane / Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil..................................... 634 Dougherty, Brian / Vanderbilt University, USA................................................................................. 502 Drira, Khalil / Université de Toulouse, France................................................................................ 1056 Edo, Miguel / Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain................................................................... 426 Edwards, Artur / University of Colima, México................................................................................ 595
Eibe, Santiago / Universitad Politecnica, Spain................................................................................. 576 Esteves Correia Bessa, Maximino / UTAD, Portugal....................................................................... 881 Fermoso García, Ana María / Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain................................... 216 Ferrás, Carlos / University of Santiago Compostela, Spain............................................................. 1182 Ferreira, Paulo / INESC ID / Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal...................................719, 1132 Filali, Fethi / EURECOM, Qatar................................................................................................. 267,356 Foncubierta Rodriguez, Antonio / University of Seville, Spain...................................................... 1199 Frangiadakis, Nikolaos / University of Maryland, USA.................................................................... 356 Freitas, Leandro / Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil......................................................... 1077 Gallinas, Roberto Berjón / Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain........................................ 216 Gallo, Crescenzio / University of Foggia, Italy.................................................................................... 31 Gan, Jiaxiang / University of Auckland, New Zealand....................................................................... 837 Garcia, Miguel / Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain...................................................... 426, 595 Garcia, Osvaldo / Pontificia Universidade Católica do PR, Brazil................................................. 1091 García, Yolanda / University of Santiago Compostela, Spain.......................................................... 1182 Garijo, Francisco / Université de Toulouse, France........................................................................ 1056 Garzão, Alex / Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), Brazil........................................ 634 Gassen, Jonas / Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil............................................................. 1077 Ghafourian, Mahsa / University of Pittsburgh, USA................................................................. 203, 298 Ghani, Farid / Universiti Malaysia Perlis, Malaysia......................................................................... 157 Gonçalves, Luiz Marcos / Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil.......................... 397 González Moreno, Juan Carlos / University of Vigo, Spain............................................................. 445 González, Betania Groba / University of A Coruna, Spain............................................................. 1169 Gonzalez, Victor / University of Manchester, UK............................................................................ 1262 González-Tablas, Ana Isabel / Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain............................................ 894 Gouveia, Luis / University Fernando Pessoa, Portugal..................................................................... 974 Grahn, Kaj / Arcada University of Applied Sciences, Finland.......................................................... 952 Gray, Breda / University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland................................................................ 381 Greve, Fabíola / Federal University of Bahia, Brazil...................................................................... 1039 Gutierrez, Encarnación Beato / Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain................................ 216 Gutiérrez, Jairo A. / Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar, Colombia............................................... 837 Harjes, Florian / Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik, Germany.......................................... 738 Hartvigsen, Gunnar / University of Tromsø, Norway........................................................................ 136 Hayes, Kathryn J. / University of Western Sydney, Australia.............................................................. 65 Hernandez-Tamames, Juan / Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain................................................. 472 Huang, Yu-An / National Chi Nan University, Taiwan...................................................................... 175 Iapichino, Giuliana / EURECOM, France......................................................................................... 267 Jalleh, Geoffrey / Curtin University of Technology, Australia........................................................... 175 Joseph, Bwalya Kelvin / University of Johannesburg, South Africa................................................... 48 Karimi, Hassan / University of Pittsburgh, USA........................................................................ 203, 298 Karlsson, Jonny / Arcada University of Applied Sciences, Finland.................................................. 952 Kimura, Bruno / University of São Paulo, Brazil.............................................................................. 522 Kirisci, Pierre / Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH, Germany.............................. 1226 Koong Lin, Hao-Chiang / National University of Tainan, Taiwan.................................................... 175
Kurtz, Guilherme / Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil...................................................... 1077 Lacouture, Jérôme / Université de Toulouse, France...................................................................... 1056 Lermen, Gustavo / Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), Brazil................................. 634 Librelotto, Giovani / Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil.................................................... 1077 Lin, Chad / Curtin University of Technology, Australia..................................................................... 175 Lloret, Jaime / Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain....................................................... 426, 1155 López Ramos, Juan Antonio / Universidad de Almería, Spain......................................................... 188 López, Justo Peralta / Universidad de Almería, Spain...................................................................... 188 López-Colino, Fernando / Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain................................................. 83 Maffei, Antonio / The Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden............................................................ 821 Mantoro, Teddy / International Islamic University Malaysia, Malaysia................................... 539, 558 Martini, Ricardo / Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil........................................................ 1077 McCrickard, Scott / Virginia Tech, USA............................................................................................... 459 Melo, Julio cesar / Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil....................................... 397 Menasalvas, Ernestina / Universitad Politecnica, Spain................................................................... 576 Mencagli, Gabriele / University of Pisa, Italy.................................................................................... 617 Menegon, Davide / University of Udine, Italy........................................................................................ 1 Menezes, Célia / Escola Sec. Inf. D. Henrique, Portugal................................................................... 250 Mentens, Nele / Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium................................................................. 930 Mizzaro, Stefano / University of Udine, Italy........................................................................................ 1 Molina, Arturo / Tecnologico de Monterrey Mexico, Mexico............................................................ 774 Monguet-Fierro, Jose María / Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain................................. 285 Morales Kluge, Ernesto / Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH, Germany.............. 1226 Moreira, Edson / University of São Paulo, Brazil............................................................................. 522 Moreira, Fernando / Universidade Portucalense, Portugal.............................................................. 250 Moreiras Lorenzo, Alberto / University of A Coruna, Spain.......................................................... 1169 Mourelos Sánchez, Iván / University of A Coruna, Spain............................................................... 1169 Naessens, Vincent / Katholieke Hogeschool Sint-Lieven, Belgium.................................................. 1246 Naranjo, Juan Álvaro Muñoz / Universidad de Almería, Spain....................................................... 188 Nazzi, Elena / University of Copenhagen, Denmark.............................................................................. 1 Ndlovu, Mandla / Botswana Accountancy College, Botswana............................................................ 48 Nieto Riveiro, Laura / University of A Coruna, Spain..................................................................... 1169 Noel, Victor / Paul Sabatier University, France............................................................................... 1056 Onori, Mauro / The Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden............................................................... 821 Osório Liberato, Nuno André / UTAD, Portugal.............................................................................. 881 Padilla Zea, Natalia / University of Granada, Spain......................................................................... 368 Pallotta, Vincenzo / Webster University, Switzerland........................................................................ 689 Parguiñas Portas, Cesar / University of Vigo, Spain......................................................................... 445 Pereira Loureiro, Javier / University of A Coruna, Spain............................................................... 1169 Pérez-Guerrero, María Luisa / Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain................................ 285 Perilli, Michele / University of Foggia, Italy........................................................................................ 31 Piotrowski, Jakub / Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik, Germany..................................... 738 Poggi, Agostino / Università degli Studi di Parma, Italy.................................................................... 343 Pose, Mariña / University of Santiago Compostela, Spain............................................................... 1182
Pousada García, Thais / University of A Coruna, Spain................................................................. 1169 Pulkkis, Göran / Arcada University of Applied Sciences, Finland.................................................... 952 Quental, Carlos / Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, Portugal................................................................ 974 Ramos, Fernando / University of Aveiro, Portugal............................................................................ 414 Rangel, Víctor / National Autonomous University of Mexico, México.............................................. 595 Reis, Elizabeth / UNIDE, ISCTE – Lisbon University Institute, Portugal......................................... 805 Rensleigh, Chris / University of Johannesburg, South Africa.............................................................. 48 Ribagorda, Arturo / Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain............................................................. 894 Rijo, Rui / IPLeiria, Portugal............................................................................................................. 487 Rodrigues, Vitor / Movensis, Portugal............................................................................................... 719 Rodriguez, Ismael Bouassida / Université de Toulouse, France..................................................... 1056 Rodríguez-Díaz, Francisco / University of Granada, Spain.............................................................. 368 Rodriguez-Sanchez, Cristina / Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain............................................... 472 Romero González, Rubén / University of Vigo, Spain...................................................................... 445 Ruthenbeck, Carmen / Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik, Germany............................... 738 Sadigh, Bahram Lotfi / Middle East Technical University, Turkey................................................... 649 Saldaña-García, Carmina / Universidad de Barcelona, Spain......................................................... 285 Salleh, M. F. M. / Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia..................................................................... 157 Sánchez Chao, Castor / University of Vigo, Spain............................................................................. 445 Sánchez Vidales, Miguel Angel / Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain............................... 216 Sánchez, Montserrat Mateos / Universidad Pontificia de Salamaca, Spain.................................... 216 Santos, David J. / Universidad San Pablo-CEU, Spain..................................................................... 994 Saraiva, Melissa / University of Aveiro, Portugal.............................................................................. 414 Schmidt, Doug / Vanderbilt University, USA...................................................................................... 502 Schneider, Claudio / Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil................................... 397 Scholz-Reiter, Bernd / Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik, Germany................................. 738 Sena, Hugo / Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil................................................ 397 Sendra, Sandra / Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain........................................................... 1155 Sens, Pierre / University Paris 6, France......................................................................................... 1039 Serrano, Luís / Polithecnic Institute Leiria, Portugal........................................................................ 703 Sibilla, Michelle / Paul Sabatier University, France........................................................................ 1056 Sidek, Othman / Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia...................................................................... 157 Silva, Lidia / University of Aveiro, Portugal....................................................................................... 414 Silva, Manuel / University Coimbra, Portugal................................................................................... 703 Simões, Diogo / Movensis, Portugal................................................................................................... 719 Soares Peres Correia, Emanuel / UTAD, Portugal........................................................................... 881 Steenhaut, Kris / Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium........................................................................ 930 Stojmenovic, Milos / University of Ottawa, Canada............................................................................ 16 Tatara, Naoe / Norwegian Centre for Integrated Care and Telemedicine, Norway........................... 136 Teixeira, Jorge / University of Aveiro, Portugal................................................................................. 414 Tessier, Catherine / ONERA Centre de Toulouse – DCSD, France................................................. 1056 Thoben, Klaus-Dieter / Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH, Germany................. 1226 Tiago, Maria Borges / University of the Azores, Portugal................................................................. 327 Tomaiuolo, Michele / Università degli Studi di Parma, Italy............................................................ 343
Touhafi, Abdellah / Erasmushogheschool Brussel, Belgium...................................................... 930, 994 Turner, Hamilton / Vanderbilt University, USA................................................................................. 502 Ünver, Özgür / TOBB-University of Economics and Technology, Turkey.......................................... 649 Vanneschi, Marco / University of Pisa, Italy...................................................................................... 617 Vanni, Renata Maria / University of São Paulo, Brazil.................................................................... 522 Vassena, Luca / University of Udine, Italy............................................................................................. 1 Vázquez, José Manuel / Universidad San Pablo-CEU, Spain........................................................... 994 Veiga, Luis / INESC ID / Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal................................................... 719 Veiga, Nuno / IPLeiria, Portugal........................................................................................................ 487 Vicente, Paula / UNIDE, ISCTE – Lisbon University Institute, Portugal.......................................... 805 Viehland, Dennis / Massey University, New Zealand......................................................................... 314 Villaseñor, Luis / CICESE Research Centre, México......................................................................... 595 Vuokko, Riikka / Åbo Akademi University, Finland........................................................................ 1119 Wang, Zhonghai / Michigan Tech University, USA........................................................................... 115 Weyn, Maarten / Artesis University College of Antwerpen, Belgium................................................ 539 White, Jules / Vanderbilt University, USA.......................................................................................... 502 Williams, Michael / Pepperdine University, USA............................................................................ 1213 Wilson, Greg / Virginia Tech, USA......................................................................................................... 459 Yahya, Abid / Universiti Malaysia Perlis, Malaysia.......................................................................... 157 Yokoyama, Roberto / University of São Paulo, Brazil...................................................................... 522 Zanda, Andrea / Universitad Politecnica, Spain............................................................................... 576 Zaščerinska, Jeļena / University of Latvia, Latvia............................................................................. 760 Zekavat, Seyed (Reza) / Michigan Tech University, USA.................................................................. 115 Zhang, Chongming / Shanghai Normal University, China................................................................ 237
Table of Contents
Foreword . ............................................................................................................................................. lx Preface . ..............................................................................................................................................lxiii Acknowledgment............................................................................................................................. lxxxv Volume I Section 1 Mobile Technologies Chapter 1 Evaluating the Context Aware Browser: A Benchmark for Proactive, Mobile, and Contextual Web Search............................................................................................................................ 1 Davide Menegon, University of Udine, Italy Stefano Mizzaro, University of Udine, Italy Elena Nazzi, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Luca Vassena, University of Udine, Italy Chapter 2 Routing in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks............................................................................... 16 Milos Stojmenovic, University of Ottawa, Canada Chapter 3 Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: Protocol Design and Implementation......................................................... 31 Crescenzio Gallo, University of Foggia, Italy Michele Perilli, University of Foggia, Italy Michelangelo De Bonis, University of Foggia, Italy
Chapter 4 Convergence of Wireless Technologies in Consolidating E-Government Applications in Sub-Saharan Africa............................................................................................................................ 48 Bwalya Kelvin Joseph, University of Johannesburg, South Africa Chris Rensleigh, University of Johannesburg, South Africa Mandla Ndlovu, Botswana Accountancy College, Botswana Chapter 5 Process Innovation with Ambient Intelligence (AmI) Technologies in Manufacturing SMEs: Absorptive Capacity Limitations........................................................................................................... 65 Kathryn J. Hayes, University of Western Sydney, Australia Ross Chapman, Deakin University Melbourne, Australia Chapter 6 Providing Ubiquitous Access to Synthetic Sign Language Contents over Multiple Platforms............. 83 Fernando López-Colino, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain Jose Colás, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain Chapter 7 The Impact of MIMO Communication on Non-Frequency Selective Channels Performance............ 100 Andreas Ahrens, Hochschule Wismar, Germany César Benavente-Peces, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain Chapter 8 Node Localization in Ad-Hoc Networks.............................................................................................. 115 Zhonghai Wang, Michigan Tech University, USA Seyed (Reza) Zekavat, Michigan Tech University, USA Chapter 9 Wireless and Mobile Technologies Improving Diabetes Self-Management........................................ 136 Eirik Årsand, Norwegian Centre for Integrated Care and Telemedicine, Norway Naoe Tatara, Norwegian Centre for Integrated Care and Telemedicine, Norway Gunnar Hartvigsen, University of Tromsø, Norway Chapter 10 Adaptive Multicarrier Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum Combined with Channel Coding........ 157 Othman Sidek, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia Abid Yahya, Universiti Malaysia Perlis, Malaysia Farid Ghani, Universiti Malaysia Perlis, Malaysia R. Badlishah Ahmad, Universiti Malaysia Perlis, Malaysia M. F. M. Salleh, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia
Chapter 11 Key Adoption Challenges and Issues of B2B E-Commerce in the Healthcare Sector........................ 175 Chad Lin, Curtin University of Technology, Australia Hao-Chiang Koong Lin, National University of Tainan, Taiwan Geoffrey Jalleh, Curtin University of Technology, Australia Yu-An Huang, National Chi Nan University, Taiwan Chapter 12 A Pervasive Polling Secret-Sharing Based Access Control Protocol for Sensitive Information......... 188 Juan Álvaro Muñoz Naranjo, Universidad de Almería, Spain Justo Peralta López, Universidad de Almería, Spain Juan Antonio López Ramos, Universidad de Almería, Spain Chapter 13 Mobile Location-Based Recommenders: An Advertisement Case Study............................................ 203 Mahsa Ghafourian, University of Pittsburgh, USA Hassan Karimi, University of Pittsburgh, USA Chapter 14 Success Cases for Mobile Devices in a Real University Scenario...................................................... 216 Montserrat Mateos Sánchez, Universidad Pontificia de Salamaca, Spain Roberto Berjón Gallinas, Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain Encarnación Beato Gutierrez, Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain Miguel Angel Sánchez Vidales, Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain Ana María Fermoso García, Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain Chapter 15 Event Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks.................................................................................... 237 Sohail Anwar, Penn State University, USA Chongming Zhang, Shanghai Normal University, China Chapter 16 M-English Podcast: A Tool for Mobile Devices.................................................................................. 250 Célia Menezes, Escola Sec. Inf. D. Henrique, Portugal Fernando Moreira, Universidade Portucalense, Portugal Chapter 17 Public Safety Networks........................................................................................................................ 267 Giuliana Iapichino, EURECOM, France Daniel Câmara, EURECOM, France Christian Bonnet, EURECOM, France Fethi Filali, EURECOM, Qatar
Chapter 18 Mobile Applications as Mobile Learning and Performance Support Tools in Psychotherapy Activitites..................................................................................................................... 285 María Luisa Pérez-Guerrero, Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain Jose María Monguet-Fierro, Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain Carmina Saldaña-García, Universidad de Barcelona, Spain Chapter 19 CampusLocator: A Mobile Location-Based Service for Learning Resources..................................... 298 Hassan Karimi, University of Pittsburgh, USA Mahsa Ghafourian, University of Pittsburgh, USA Chapter 20 The Future of WiMAX......................................................................................................................... 314 Dennis Viehland, Massey University, New Zealand Sheenu Chawla, SUSH Global Solutions, New Zealand Chapter 21 Determinants of Loyalty Intention in Portuguese Mobile Market....................................................... 327 Maria Borges Tiago, University of the Azores, Portugal Francisco Amaral, University of the Azores, Portugal Chapter 22 Mobile Agents: Concepts and Technologies........................................................................................ 343 Agostino Poggi, Università degli Studi di Parma, Italy Michele Tomaiuolo, Università degli Studi di Parma, Italy Chapter 23 Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks..................................................................................................... 356 Daniel Câmara, EURECOM Sophia Antipolis, France Nikolaos Frangiadakis, University of Maryland, USA Fethi Filali, QU Wireless Innovations Center, Qatar Christian Bonnet, EURECOM Sophia Antipolis, France Chapter 24 Monitoring the Learning Process through the Use of Mobile Devices............................................... 368 Francisco Rodríguez-Díaz, University of Granada, Spain Natalia Padilla Zea, University of Granada, Spain Marcelino Cabrera, University of Granada, Spain
Chapter 25 The Making of Nomadic Work: Understanding the Mediational Role of ICTs................................... 381 Aparecido Fabiano Pinatti de Carvalho, University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland Luigina Ciolfi, University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland Breda Gray, University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland Chapter 26 I-Gate: Interperception – Get all the Environments............................................................................. 397 Rummenigge Dantas, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil Luiz Marcos Gonçalves, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil Claudio Schneider, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil Aquiles Burlamaqui, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil Ricardo Dias, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil Hugo Sena, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil Julio cesar Melo, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil Chapter 27 CONNECTOR: A Geolocated Mobile Social Service......................................................................... 414 Pedro Almeida, University of Aveiro, Portugal Jorge Abreu, University of Aveiro, Portugal Margarida Almeida, University of Aveiro, Portugal Maria Antunes, University of Aveiro, Portugal Lidia Silva, University of Aveiro, Portugal Melissa Saraiva, University of Aveiro, Portugal Jorge Teixeira, University of Aveiro, Portugal Fernando Ramos, University of Aveiro, Portugal Chapter 28 Providing VoIP and IPTV Services in WLANs................................................................................... 426 Miguel Edo, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Alejandro Canovas, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Miguel Garcia, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Jaime Lloret, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Chapter 29 SIe-Health, e-Health Information System............................................................................................ 445 Juan Carlos González Moreno, University of Vigo, Spain Loxo Lueiro Astray, University of Vigo, Spain Rubén Romero González, University of Vigo, Spain Cesar Parguiñas Portas, University of Vigo, Spain Castor Sánchez Chao, University of Vigo, Spain
Chapter 30 Combining Location Tracking and RFID Tagging toward an Improved Research Infrastructure...........459 Greg Wilson, Virginia Tech, USA Scott McCrickard, Virginia Tech, USA Chapter 31 Model and Infrastructure for Communications in Context-Aware Services........................................ 472 Cristina Rodriguez-Sanchez, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain Susana Borromeo, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain Juan Hernandez-Tamames, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain Chapter 32 Network Mobility and Mobile Applications Development................................................................. 487 Rui Rijo, IPLeiria, Portugal Nuno Veiga, IPLeiria, Portugal Silvio Bernardes, IPLeiria, Portugal Chapter 33 Building Mobile Sensor Networks Using Smartphones and Web Services: Ramifications and Development Challenges.............................................................................................................. 502 Hamilton Turner, Vanderbilt University, USA Jules White, Vanderbilt University, USA Brian Dougherty, Vanderbilt University, USA Doug Schmidt, Vanderbilt University, USA Chapter 34 Technologies to Improve the Quality of Handovers: Ontologies, Contexts and Mobility Management.......................................................................................................................... 522 Edson Moreira, University of São Paulo, Brazil Bruno Kimura, University of São Paulo, Brazil Renata Maria Vanni, University of São Paulo, Brazil Roberto Yokoyama, University of São Paulo, Brazil Chapter 35 Making Location-Aware Computing Working Accurately in Smart Spaces....................................... 539 Teddy Mantoro, International Islamic University Malaysia, Malaysia Media Ayu, International Islamic University Malaysia, Malaysia Maarten Weyn, Artesis University College of Antwerpen, Belgium Chapter 36 User Pro-Activities Based on Context History.................................................................................... 558 Teddy Mantoro, International Islamic University Malaysia, Malaysia Media Ayu, International Islamic University Malaysia, Malaysia
Section 2 Emerging Technologies Chapter 37 Research Challenge of Locally Computed Ubiquitous Data Mining.................................................. 576 Aysegul Cayci, Sabanci University, Turkey João Bártolo Gomes, Universitad Politecnica, Spain Andrea Zanda, Universitad Politecnica, Spain Ernestina Menasalvas, Universitad Politecnica, Spain Santiago Eibe, Universitad Politecnica, Spain Chapter 38 Emerging Wireless Networks for Social Applications......................................................................... 595 Raúl Aquino, University of Colima, México Luis Villaseñor, CICESE Research Centre, México Víctor Rangel, National Autonomous University of Mexico, México Miguel García, University of Colima, México Artur Edwards, University of Colima, México Chapter 39 An Approach to Mobile Grid Platforms for the Development and Support of Complex Ubiquitous Application........................................................................................................ 617 Carlo Bertolli, University of Pisa, Italy Daniele Buono, University of Pisa, Italy Gabriele Mencagli, University of Pisa, Italy Marco Vanneschi, University of Pisa, Italy Chapter 40 Towards a Programming Model for Ubiquitous Computing............................................................... 634 Jorge Barbosa, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), Brazil Fabiane Dillenburg, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil Alex Garzão, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), Brazil Gustavo Lermen, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), Brazil Cristiano Costa, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), Brazil Volume II Chapter 41 An Agent-Based Operational Virtual Enterprise Framework Enabled by RFID................................. 649 Özgür Ünver, TOBB-University of Economics and Technology, Turkey Bahram Lotfi Sadigh, Middle East Technical University, Turkey
Chapter 42 Ontological Dimensions of Semantic Mobile Web 2.0: First Principles............................................. 667 Gonzalo Aranda-Corral, University of Sevilla, Spain Joaquín Borrego-Díaz, University of Sevilla, Spain Chapter 43 Unobtrusive Interaction with Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing Systems through Kinetic User Interfaces..................................................................................................................................... 689 Vincenzo Pallotta, Webster University, Switzerland Chapter 44 Impact of Advances on Computing and Communication Systems in Automotive Testing................. 703 Luís Serrano, Polithecnic Institute Leiria, Portugal José Costa, University Coimbra, Portugal Manuel Silva, University Coimbra, Portugal Chapter 45 RFID and NFC in the Future of Mobile Computing........................................................................... 719 Diogo Simões, Movensis, Portugal Vitor Rodrigues, Movensis, Portugal Luis Veiga, INESC ID / Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal Paulo Ferreira, INESC ID / Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal Chapter 46 A Multi-Loop Development Process for a Wearable Computing System in Autonomous Logistics......................................................................................................................... 738 Jakub Piotrowski, Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik, Germany Carmen Ruthenbeck, Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik, Germany Florian Harjes, Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik, Germany Bernd Scholz-Reiter, Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik, Germany Section 3 Critical Success Factors Chapter 47 Collaboration within Social Dimension of Computing: Theoretical Background, Empirical Findings and Practical Development.................................................................................. 760 Andreas Ahrens, University of Technology, Business and Design, Germany Jeļena Zaščerinska, University of Latvia, Latvia Olaf Bassus, University of Technology, Business and Design, Germany
Chapter 48 Critical Factors in Defining the Mobile Learning Model: An Innovative Process for Hybrid Learning at the Tecnologico de Monterrey, a Mexican University......................................... 774 Violeta Chirino-Barceló, Tecnologico de Monterrey Mexico, Mexico Arturo Molina, Tecnologico de Monterrey Mexico, Mexico Chapter 49 Critical Human Factors on Mobile Applications for Tourism and Entertainment............................... 793 Pedro Campos, University of Madeira, Portugal Chapter 50 Internet Surveys: Opportunities and Challenges.................................................................................. 805 Paula Vicente, UNIDE, ISCTE – Lisbon University Institute, Portugal Elizabeth Reis, UNIDE, ISCTE – Lisbon University Institute, Portugal Chapter 51 Evolvable Production Systems: A Coalition-Based Production Approach.......................................... 821 Marcus Bjelkemyr, The Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden Antonio Maffei, The Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden Mauro Onori, The Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden Section 4 New Business Models Chapter 52 Viable Business Models for M-Commerce: The Key Components..................................................... 837 Jiaxiang Gan, University of Auckland, New Zealand Jairo A. Gutiérrez, Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar, Colombia Chapter 53 A Service-Based Framework to Model Mobile Enterprise Architectures........................................... 853 Jose Delgado, Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal Chapter 54 Research-Based Insights Inform Change in IBM M-Learning Strategy............................................. 871 Nabeel Ahmad, IBM Center for Advanced Learning, USA Chapter 55 Location Based E-Commerce System: An Architecture...................................................................... 881 Nuno André Osório Liberato, UTAD, Portugal João Eduardo Quintela Alves de Sousa Varajão, UTAD, Portugal Emanuel Soares Peres Correia, UTAD, Portugal Maximino Esteves Correia Bessa, UTAD, Portugal
Section 5 Security Chapter 56 Overview of Security Issues in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks.............................................................. 894 José María De Fuentes, Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain Ana Isabel González-Tablas, Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain Arturo Ribagorda, Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain Chapter 57 Modelling of Location-Aware Access Control Rules.......................................................................... 912 Michael Decker, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany Chapter 58 Secure Techniques for Remote Reconfiguration of Wireless Embedded Systems.............................. 930 Abdellah Touhafi, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium An Braeken, Erasmushogeschool Brussel, Belgium Gianluca Cornetta, Universidad San Pablo-CEU, Spain Nele Mentens, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium Kris Steenhaut, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium Chapter 59 Secure Routing and Mobility in Future IP Networks.......................................................................... 952 Kaj Grahn, Arcada University of Applied Sciences, Finland Jonny Karlsson, Arcada University of Applied Sciences, Finland Göran Pulkkis, Arcada University of Applied Sciences, Finland Section 6 Applications, Surveys and Case Studies Chapter 60 Evaluation of a Mobile Platform to Support Collaborative Learning: Case Study............................. 974 Carlos Quental, Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, Portugal Luis Gouveia, University Fernando Pessoa, Portugal Chapter 61 Power Issues and Energy Scavenging in Mobile Wireless Ad-Hoc and Sensor Networks................. 994 Gianluca Cornetta, Universidad San Pablo-CEU, Spain Abdellah Touhafi, Erasmushogheschool Brussel, Belgium David J. Santos, Universidad San Pablo-CEU, Spain José Manuel Vázquez, Universidad San Pablo-CEU, Spain
Chapter 62 A Low Cost Wireless Sensors Network with Low-Complexity and Fast-Prototyping...................... 1021 João Paulo Carmo, University of Minho, Portugal José Higino Correia, University of Minho, Portugal Chapter 63 Unreliable Failure Detectors for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks.............................................................. 1039 Luciana Arantes, University Paris 6, France Fabíola Greve, Federal University of Bahia, Brazil Pierre Sens, University Paris 6, France Chapter 64 Mission-Aware Adaptive Communication for Collaborative Mobile Entities................................... 1056 Jérôme Lacouture, Université de Toulouse, France Ismael Bouassida Rodriguez, Université de Toulouse, France Jean-Paul Arcangeli, Paul Sabatier University, France Christophe Chassot, Université de Toulouse, France Thierry Desprats, Paul Sabatier University, France Khalil Drira, Université de Toulouse, France Francisco Garijo, Université de Toulouse, France Victor Noel, Paul Sabatier University, France Michelle Sibilla, Paul Sabatier University, France Catherine Tessier, ONERA Centre de Toulouse – DCSD, France Chapter 65 OntoHealth: An Ontology Applied to Pervasive Hospital Environments.......................................... 1077 Giovani Librelotto, Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil Iara Augustin, Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil Jonas Gassen, Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil Guilherme Kurtz, Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil Leandro Freitas, Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil Ricardo Martini, Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil Renato Azevedo, Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil Chapter 66 Adoption of Mobile and Information Technology in an Energy Utility in Brazil............................. 1091 Osvaldo Garcia, Pontificia Universidade Católica do PR, Brazil Maria Cunha, Pontificia Universidade Católica do PR, Brazil
Chapter 67 Infrastructures for Development of Context-Aware Mobile Applications......................................... 1104 Hugo Feitosa de Figueirêdo, University of Campina Grande, Brazil Tiago Eduardo da Silva, University of Campina Grande, Brazil Anselmo Cardoso de Paiva, University of Maranhão, Brazil José Eustáquio Rangel de Queiroz, University of Campina Grande, Brazil Cláudio De Souza Baptista, University of Campina Grande, Brazil Chapter 68 A Practice Perspective on Transforming Mobile Work..................................................................... 1119 Riikka Vuokko, Åbo Akademi University, Finland Chapter 69 Data Replication Support for Collaboration in Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing Environments.......... 1132 João Barreto, INESC-ID/Technical University Lisbon, Portugal Paulo Ferreira, INESC-ID/Technical University Lisbon, Portugal Chapter 70 Providing Outdoor and Indoor Ubiquity with WLANs..................................................................... 1155 Diana Bri, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Hugo Coll, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Sandra Sendra, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Jaime Lloret, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Chapter 71 In-TIC for Mobile Devices: Support System for Communication with Mobile Devices for the Disabled.................................................................................................................................. 1169 Cristina Diaz Busch, University of A Coruna, Spain Alberto Moreiras Lorenzo, University of A Coruna, Spain Iván Mourelos Sánchez, University of A Coruna, Spain Betania Groba González, University of A Coruna, Spain Thais Pousada García, University of A Coruna, Spain Laura Nieto Riveiro, University of A Coruna, Spain Javier Pereira Loureiro, University of A Coruna, Spain Chapter 72 New Ways to Buy and Sell: An Information Management Web System for the Commercialization of Agricultural Products from Family Farms without Intermediaries................ 1182 Carlos Ferrás, University of Santiago Compostela, Spain Yolanda García, University of Santiago Compostela, Spain Mariña Pose, University of Santiago Compostela, Spain
Chapter 73 Broadcast Quality Video Contribution in Mobility........................................................................... 1199 José Ramón Cerquides Bueno, University of Seville, Spain Antonio Foncubierta Rodriguez, University of Seville, Spain Chapter 74 Mobile Device Selection in Higher Education: iPhone vs. iPod Touch............................................ 1213 C. Brad Crisp, Abilene Christian University, USA Michael Williams, Pepperdine University, USA Chapter 75 Design of Wearable Computing Systems for Future Industrial Environments.................................. 1226 Pierre Kirisci, Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH, Germany Ernesto Morales Kluge, Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH, Germany Emanuel Angelescu, Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH, Germany Klaus-Dieter Thoben, Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH, Germany Chapter 76 Extending the Scope of eID Technology: Threats and Opportunities in a Commercial Setting........ 1246 Vincent Naessens, Katholieke Hogeschool Sint-Lieven, Belgium Bart De Decker, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium Chapter 77 Mobility and Connectivity: On the Character of Mobile Information Work..................................... 1262 Victor Gonzalez, University of Manchester, UK Antonis Demetriou, University of Manchester, UK
Detailed Table of Contents
Foreword . ............................................................................................................................................. lx Preface . ..............................................................................................................................................lxiii Acknowledgment............................................................................................................................. lxxxv Section 1 Mobile Technologies Chapter 1 Evaluating the Context Aware Browser: A Benchmark for Proactive, Mobile, and Contextual Web Search............................................................................................................................ 1 Davide Menegon, University of Udine, Italy Stefano Mizzaro, University of Udine, Italy Elena Nazzi, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Luca Vassena, University of Udine, Italy Chapter 1 discusses the evaluation of highly interactive and novel context-aware system with a methodology based on a TREC-like benchmark. The authors take as a case study an application for Web content perusal by means of context-aware mobile devices, named Context-Aware Browser. In this application, starting from the representation of the user’s current context, queries are automatically constructed and used to retrieve the most relevant Web contents. Since several alternatives for query construction exist, it is important to compare their effectiveness, and to this aim we developed a TREClike benchmark. The authors present their approach to an early stage evaluation, describing their aims and the techniques applied, underlining for, for the evaluation of context-aware retrieval systems, the benchmark methodology adopted could be an extensible and reliable tool. Chapter 2 Routing in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks............................................................................... 16 Milos Stojmenovic, University of Ottawa, Canada Routing is the process of finding a path from a source node to a destination node. Proposed routing schemes can be divided into topological and position based, depending on the availability of geograph-
ic location for nodes. Topological routing may be proactive or reactive, while position based routing consists of greedy approaches applied when a neighbor closer to the destination (than the node currently holding the packet) exists, and recovery schemes otherwise. In order to preserve bandwidth and power which are critical resources in ad hoc and sensor networks, localized approaches are proposed, where each node acts based solely on the location of itself, its neighbors, and the destination. There are various measures of optimality which lead to various schemes which optimize hop count, power, network lifetime, delay, or other metrics. This second chapter describes a uniform solution based on ratio of cost and progress. Chapter 3 Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: Protocol Design and Implementation......................................................... 31 Crescenzio Gallo, University of Foggia, Italy Michele Perilli, University of Foggia, Italy Michelangelo De Bonis, University of Foggia, Italy Mobile communication networks have become an integral part of our society, significantly enhancing communication capabilities. Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) extend this capability to any time/ anywhere communication, providing connectivity without the need of an underlying infrastructure. Chapter 2 investigates the new coming realm of mobile ad hoc networks, focusing on research problems related to the design and development of routing protocols, both from a formal and technical point of view. Then the link stability in a high mobility environment is examined, and a route discovery mechanism is analyzed, together with a practical implementation of a routing protocol in ad hoc multirate environments which privileges link stability instead of traditional speed and minimum distance approaches. Chapter 4 Convergence of Wireless Technologies in Consolidating E-Government Applications in Sub-Saharan Africa............................................................................................................................ 48 Bwalya Kelvin Joseph, University of Johannesburg, South Africa Chris Rensleigh, University of Johannesburg, South Africa Mandla Ndlovu, Botswana Accountancy College, Botswana The convergence of wireless applications presents a greater hope for consolidating e-Government applications even in resource-constrained countries such as those in Africa. This chapter presents an exploratory study that aims at discussing the extent as to how convergence of wireless technologies from different vendors promises to contribute to the consolidation of e-Government applications in Sub-Saharan-Africa (SSA). This is done by reviewing the different adoption stages of ICT and eGovernment in SSA. It looks at challenges facing adoption of wireless technologies (GSMs, Wireless Internet Access, satellite transmission, etc.) across all the socio-economic value chains in SSA. The chapter looks at Botswana and South Africa as case studies by bringing out the different interventions that have been done in the realm of facilitating a conducive environment for the convergence of different wireless technologies. Out of the analysis of legal, regulatory, market and spectrum policies affecting the adoption of wireless communications in SSAs, the chapter draws out recommendations on how to consolidate wireless communications to be adopted in different socio-economic setups (e.g. e-government, e-Health, e-Banking, etc.).
Chapter 5 Process Innovation with Ambient Intelligence (AmI) Technologies in Manufacturing SMEs: Absorptive Capacity Limitations........................................................................................................... 65 Kathryn J. Hayes, University of Western Sydney, Australia Ross Chapman, Deakin University Melbourne, Australia This Chapter 5 considers the potential for absorptive capacity limitations to prevent SME manufacturers benefiting from the implementation of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) technologies. The chapter also examines the role of intermediary organisations in alleviating these absorptive capacity constraints. In order to understand the context of the research, a review of the role of SMEs in the Australian manufacturing industry, plus the impacts of government innovation policy and absorptive capacity constraints in SMEs in Australia is provided. Advances in the development of ICT industry standards, and the proliferation of software and support for the Windows/Intel platform have brought technology to SMEs without the need for bespoke development. The results from the joint European and Australian AmI4-SME projects suggest that SMEs can successfully use “external research sub-units” in the form of industry networks, research organisations and technology providers to offset internal absorptive capacity limitations. Chapter 6 Providing Ubiquitous Access to Synthetic Sign Language Contents over Multiple Platforms............. 83 Fernando López-Colino, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain Jose Colás, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain Chapter 6 presents the design of distributed sign language synthesis architecture. The main objective of this design is to adapt the synthesis process to the diversity of user devices. The synthesis process has been divided into several independent modules that can be run either in a dedicated server or in the client device. Depending on the modules assigned to the server or to the client, four different scenarios have been defined. These scenarios may vary from a heavy client design which executes the whole synthesis process, to a light client design similar to a video player. These four scenarios will provide equivalent signed message quality independently of the device’s hardware and software resources. Chapter 7 The Impact of MIMO Communication on Non-Frequency Selective Channels Performance............ 100 Andreas Ahrens, Hochschule Wismar, Germany César Benavente-Peces, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain Chapter 7 reviews the basic concepts of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems and analyses their performance within non-frequency selective channels. The MIMO system model is established and by applying the singular value decomposition (SVD) to the channel matrix, the whole MIMO system can be transformed into multiple single-input single-output (SISO) channels having unequal gains. In order to analyze the system performance, the quality criteria needed to calculate the error probability of M-ary QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) are briefly reviewed and used as reference to measure the improvements when applying different signal processing techniques. Bit and power allocation is a well-known technique that allows improvement in the bit-error rate (BER)
by managing appropriately the different properties of the multiple SISO channels. It can be used to balance the BER’s in the multiple SISO channels when minimizing the overall BER. In order to compare the various results, the efficiency of fixed transmission modes is studied in this work regardless of the channel quality. It is demonstrated that only an appropriate number of MIMO layers should be activated when minimizing the overall BER under the constraints of a given fixed date rate. Chapter 8 Node Localization in Ad-Hoc Networks.............................................................................................. 115 Zhonghai Wang, Michigan Tech University, USA Seyed (Reza) Zekavat, Michigan Tech University, USA Chapter 8 introduces node localization techniques in ad-hoc networks including received signal strength (RSS), time-of-arrival (TOA) and direction-of-arrival (DOA). Wireless channels in ad-hoc networks can be categorized as LOS and NLOS. In LOS channels, the majority of localization techniques perform properly. However, in NLOS channels, the performance of these techniques reduces. Therefore, non-line-of-sight (NLOS) identification and mitigation techniques, and localization techniques for NLOS scenarios are briefly reviewed. Chapter 9 Wireless and Mobile Technologies Improving Diabetes Self-Management........................................ 136 Eirik Årsand, Norwegian Centre for Integrated Care and Telemedicine, Norway Naoe Tatara, Norwegian Centre for Integrated Care and Telemedicine, Norway Gunnar Hartvigsen, University of Tromsø, Norway The technological revolution that has created a vast health problem due to a drastic change in lifestyle also holds great potential for individuals to take better care of their own health. This is the focus of the presented overview of current applications, and prospects for future research and innovations. The presented overview and the main goals of the systems included are to utilize ICT as aids in self-management of individual health challenges, for the disease Diabetes, both for Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. People with diabetes are generally as mobile as the rest of the population, and should have access to mobile technologies for managing their disease. Forty-seven relevant studies and prototypes of mobile, diabetes-specific self-management tools meeting our inclusion criteria have been identified; 27 publicly available products and services, nine relevant patent applications, and 31 examples of other diseaserelated mobile self-management systems are included to provide a broader overview of the state of the art. Finally, the reviewed systems are compared, and future research directions are suggested. Chapter 10 Adaptive Multicarrier Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum Combined with Channel Coding........ 157 Othman Sidek, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia Abid Yahya, Universiti Malaysia Perlis, Malaysia Farid Ghani, Universiti Malaysia Perlis, Malaysia R. Badlishah Ahmad, Universiti Malaysia Perlis, Malaysia M. F. M. Salleh, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia
Chapter 10 presents an adaptive Multicarrier Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (MCFH-SS) system employing proposed Quasi Cyclic Low Density Parity Check (QC-LDPC) codes instead of the conventional LDPC codes. A new technique for constructing the QC-LDPC codes based on row division method is proposed. The new codes offer more flexibility in terms of girth, code rates and codeword length. Moreover, a new scheme for channel prediction in MCFH-SS system is also proposed. The technique adaptively estimates the channel conditions and eliminates the need for the system to transmit a request message prior to transmitting the packet data. The proposed adaptive MCFH-SS system uses PN sequences to spread out frequency spectrum, reduce the power spectral density and minimize the jammer effects. Chapter 11 Key Adoption Challenges and Issues of B2B E-Commerce in the Healthcare Sector........................ 175 Chad Lin, Curtin University of Technology, Australia Hao-Chiang Koong Lin, National University of Tainan, Taiwan Geoffrey Jalleh, Curtin University of Technology, Australia Yu-An Huang, National Chi Nan University, Taiwan Although B2B e-commerce provides healthcare organizations a wealth of new opportunities and ways of doing business, it also presents them with a series of challenges. B2B e-commerce adoption remain poorly understood and it is also a relatively under-researched area. Therefore, case studies were conducted to investigate the challenges and issues in adopting and utilizing B2B e-commerce systems in the healthcare sector. The major aims of the study presented in Chapter 11 are to: (a) identify and examine main B2B e-commerce adoption challenges and issues for healthcare organizations; and (b) develop a B2B e-commerce adoption challenges and issues table to assist healthcare organizations in identifying and managing them. Chapter 12 A Pervasive Polling Secret-Sharing Based Access Control Protocol for Sensitive Information......... 188 Juan Álvaro Muñoz Naranjo, Universidad de Almería, Spain Justo Peralta López, Universidad de Almería, Spain Juan Antonio López Ramos, Universidad de Almería, Spain Chapter 12 presents a novel access control mechanism for sensitive information which requires permission from different entities or persons to be accessed. The mechanism consists of a file structure and a protocol which extend the features of the OpenPGP Message Format standard by using secret sharing techniques. Several authors are allowed to work in the same file, while access is blocked for not authorized users. Access control rules can be set indicating the minimum number of authors that need to be gathered together in order to open the file. Furthermore, these rules can be different for each section of the document, allowing collaborative work. Non-repudiation and authentication are achieved by means of a shared signature. The scheme’s features are best appreciated when using it in a mobile scenario. Deployment in such an environment is easy and straight
Chapter 13 Mobile Location-Based Recommenders: An Advertisement Case Study............................................ 203 Mahsa Ghafourian, University of Pittsburgh, USA Hassan Karimi, University of Pittsburgh, USA Mobile devices, including cell phones, capable of geo-positioning (or localization) are paving the way for new computer assisted systems called mobile location-based recommenders (MLBRs). MLBRs are systems that combine information on user’s location with information about user’s interests and requests to provide recommendations that are based on “location”. MLBR applications are numerous and emerging. One MLBR application is in advertisement where stores announce their coupons and users try to find the coupons of their interests nearby their locations through their cell phones. Chapter 13 discusses the concept and characteristics of MLBRs and presents the architecture and components of a MLBR for advertisement. Chapter 14 Success Cases for Mobile Devices in a Real University Scenario...................................................... 216 Montserrat Mateos Sánchez, Universidad Pontificia de Salamaca, Spain Roberto Berjón Gallinas, Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain Encarnación Beato Gutierrez, Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain Miguel Angel Sánchez Vidales, Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain Ana María Fermoso García, Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain Mobile devices have become a new platform with many possibilities to develop studies and implement projects. The power and current capabilities of these devices besides its market penetration makes applications and services in the area of mobility particularly interesting. Mobile terminals have become small computers, they have an operating system, storage capacity so it is possible to develop applications that run on them. Today these applications are highly valued by users. Nowadays we want not only to talk or send messages by mobile terminal, but also to play games, to buy cinema tickets, to read email… We can bring these capabilities in our pocket. The University may not be aware of this fact. The students, due to their age, are the main users and purchasers. In this sense, Chapter 14 presents three applications developed for mobile devices, that are being used in Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca. All of them work on a university scenario and use different kind of services. Chapter 15 Event Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks.................................................................................... 237 Sohail Anwar, Penn State University, USA Chongming Zhang, Shanghai Normal University, China Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have experienced an amazing evolution during the last decade. Compared with other wired or wireless networks, wireless sensor networks extend the range of data collection and make it possible for us to get information from every corner of the world. The chapter begins with an introduction to WSNs and their applications. Chapter 15 recognizes event detection as a key component for WSN applications. The chapter provides a structured and comprehensive overview of various techniques used for event detection in WSNs. Existing event detection techniques have
been grouped into threshold based and pattern based mechanisms. For each category of event detection mechanism, the chapter surveys some representative technical schemes. The chapter also provides some analyses on the relative strengths and weaknesses of these technical schemes. Towards the end, the trends in the research regarding the event detection in WSNs are described. Chapter 16 M-English Podcast: A Tool for Mobile Devices.................................................................................. 250 Célia Menezes, Escola Sec. Inf. D. Henrique, Portugal Fernando Moreira, Universidade Portucalense, Portugal At the beginning of the 21st century in a world dominated by technology it is essential to enhance and update the school, creating conditions for the students to succeed, consolidating the role of ICT as a key resource for learning and teaching in this new era. In Chapter 16 the authors describe a study that was carried out in a Portuguese school. As a means to overcome some of the existing logistical obstacles in the school, where the possibility of carrying out ICT activities without restrictions was still dreamlike, the podcast was implemented as an m-learning tool. Being aware of the fact that nowadays mobile phones and mp3 players are part of our students’ lives, the authors took advantage of this fact and the podcast was used as a tool to support, to enhance and to motivate students to learn English, used thus as a complement to traditional (face-to-face) learning. Chapter 17 Public Safety Networks........................................................................................................................ 267 Giuliana Iapichino, EURECOM, France Daniel Câmara, EURECOM, France Christian Bonnet, EURECOM, France Fethi Filali, EURECOM, Qatar Disaster can be defined as the onset of an extreme event causing profound damage or loss as perceived by the afflicted people. The networks built in order to detect and handle these events are called Public safety networks (PSNs). These networks have the fundamental role of providing communication and coordination for emergency operations. Many of the problems of the PSN field come from the heterogeneity of systems and agencies involved in the crisis site and from their mobility at the disaster site. The main aim of Chapter 17 is to provide a broad view of the PSN field, presenting the different emergency management phases, PSNs requirements, technologies and some of the future research directions for this field. Chapter 18 Mobile Applications as Mobile Learning and Performance Support Tools in Psychotherapy Activitites..................................................................................................................... 285 María Luisa Pérez-Guerrero, Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain Jose María Monguet-Fierro, Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain Carmina Saldaña-García, Universidad de Barcelona, Spain
The purpose of Chapter 18 is the analysis of mobile applications as performance and informal learning support tools that facilitate the development of the psychotherapy process. The “e-therapy” has become a common term to refer the delivery of mental health services, on-line or related to a computer mediated communication between a psychotherapist and the patient. Initially, a background on e-therapy is provided and after the “self-help therapy”–a kind of e-therapy where the concept of patient empowerment is important– is exposed. Then, the integration of mobile devices in the psychotherapy process will be explained considering how their technological features support patient therapeutic activities like behavior assessment and informal mobile learning. The relation of the mobile devices with psychotherapist work activities such as evidence gathering and patient monitoring will also be explained. The chapter includes a discussion on the mobile learning practices as a source of potential strategies that can be applied in the therapeutic field and finally a set of recommendations and future directions are described to explore new lines of research. Chapter 19 CampusLocator: A Mobile Location-Based Service for Learning Resources..................................... 298 Hassan Karimi, University of Pittsburgh, USA Mahsa Ghafourian, University of Pittsburgh, USA Location-based services (LBSs) are impacting different aspects of human’s life. To date, different LBSs have been emerged, each supporting a specific application or service. While some LBSs have aimed at addressing the needs of general populations, such as navigation systems, others have been focused on addressing the needs of specific populations, including kids, youths, elderly, and people with special needs. In recent years, interest in taking a LBS approach in education and learning has grown. The main purpose of such educational LBSs is facilitating a means for learners to be more efficient and effective in their learning activities using their location as the underlying information in decision making. In this chapter, we present a novel LBS, called CampusLocator, whose main goal is to assist students in locating and accessing learning resources including libraries, seminars, and tutorials that are available on a campus. Chapter 20 The Future of WiMAX......................................................................................................................... 314 Dennis Viehland, Massey University, New Zealand Sheenu Chawla, SUSH Global Solutions, New Zealand WiMAX is being promoted as a potential solution to a number of problems that have plagued the wired and wireless broadband industry since it originated. Can WiMAX fulfill this promise in a crowded and competitive market? If so, what factors are critical to its success? Who will use WiMAX and for what purposes? This chapter identifies both the critical success factors that will give WiMAX an edge over other existing wireless technologies and the key applications that will contribute to its success. The top three critical success factors for WiMAX are availability of handset devices and consumer premise equipment, bandwidth speed, and interoperability and standardization. A panel of WiMAX experts concludes that broadband on demand, wireless services provider access, and Voice over IP are the top three killer applications for WiMAX.
Chapter 21 Determinants of Loyalty Intention in Portuguese Mobile Market....................................................... 327 Maria Borges Tiago, University of the Azores, Portugal Francisco Amaral, University of the Azores, Portugal Chapter 21 conceptualizes and highlights the determinants of customers’ loyalty in the Portuguese mobile market. The authors raise questions about the interrelationships of the cost and values dimensions and the consequences of these relationships on customer satisfaction and trust and consequently loyalty among different operators, addressing some recent models. By organizing and synthesizing the major research streams and tests empirically a conceptual framework through a SEM, with data gather in a survey of Portuguese clients, the present study advances knowledge on the nature of the relative importance of different components of loyalty to mobile communications operators. Some useful preliminary insights were produced related to customers’ retention process in primary mobile operator, which appears strongly related to price/quality, followed by the emotional connection to the operator staff and others clients. Nonetheless, a considerable number of issues were left for future research, including the possibility of extending the investigation to other countries. Chapter 22 Mobile Agents: Concepts and Technologies........................................................................................ 343 Agostino Poggi, Università degli Studi di Parma, Italy Michele Tomaiuolo, Università degli Studi di Parma, Italy Current technological advances and the increasing diffusion of its use for scientific, financial and social activities, make Internet the de facto platform for providing worldwide distributed data storage, distributed computing and communication. It creates new opportunities for the development of new kinds of applications, but it will also create several challenges in managing the information distributed on the Internet and in guaranteeing its “on-time” access through the network infrastructures that realize the Internet. Many researchers believed and still believe that the mobile agents could propose several attractive solutions to deal with such challenges and problems. Chapter 22 presents the core concepts of mobile agents, and attempts to provide a clear idea of the possibility of their use by introducing the problems they cope with, the application areas where they provide advantages with respect to other technologies and the available mobile agent technologies. Chapter 23 Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks..................................................................................................... 356 Daniel Câmara, EURECOM Sophia Antipolis, France Nikolaos Frangiadakis, University of Maryland, USA Fethi Filali, QU Wireless Innovations Center, Qatar Christian Bonnet, EURECOM Sophia Antipolis, France Traditional networks suppose the existence of some path between endpoints, small end to end roundtrip Delay time, and loss ratio. Today, however, new applications, environments and types of devices are challenging these assumptions. In Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), an end-to-end path from source to destination may not exist. Nodes may connect and exchange information in an opportunistic
way. Chapter 23 presents a broad overview of DTNs, particularly focusing on Vehicular DTNs, their main characteristics, challenges, and research projects on this field. In the near future, cars are expected to be equipped with devices that will allow them to communicate wirelessly. However, there will be strict restrictions to the duration of their connections with other vehicles, whereas the conditions of their links will greatly vary; DTNs present an attractive solution. Therefore, VDTNs constitute an attractive research field. Chapter 24 Monitoring the Learning Process through the Use of Mobile Devices............................................... 368 Francisco Rodríguez-Díaz, University of Granada, Spain Natalia Padilla Zea, University of Granada, Spain Marcelino Cabrera, University of Granada, Spain It has been substantially proven that computer operation can be learnt at an early age, and that the use of new technologies can improve a child’s learning process. However, the main problem for the teacher continues to be that he/she cannot pay attention to all children at the same time. Sometimes it is necessary to decide which child must be first attended to. It is in this context that we believe our system has the ability to greatly help teachers: we have developed a learning process control system that allows teachers to determine which students have problems, how many times a child has failed, which activities they are working on and other such useful information, in order to decide how to distribute his/ her time. Furthermore, bearing in mind the attention required by kindergarten students, we propose the provision of mobile devices (PDA - Personal Digital Assistant) for teachers, permitting free movement in the classroom and allowing the teacher to continue to help children while information about other students is being received. Therefore if a new problem arises the teacher is immediately notified and can act accordingly. Chapter 25 The Making of Nomadic Work: Understanding the Mediational Role of ICTs................................... 381 Aparecido Fabiano Pinatti de Carvalho, University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland Luigina Ciolfi, University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland Breda Gray, University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland Computer technologies, especially ICT have become ubiquitous in people’s lives. Nowadays, mobile phones, PDAs, laptops and a constellation of software tools are more and more used for a variety of activities carried out in both personal and professional lives. Given the features that these technologies provide and are provided with, for example, connectivity and portability, it can be said that ICTs have the potential to support nomadic work practices which are seen as increasingly characteristic of the knowledge economy. Chapter 25 presents a review of the concept of nomadic work and, based on a broad literature analysis, discusses the ways in which ICTs may empower people who are involved with nomadic work practices. It aims to give a starting point for those who intend to develop further research on technologically-mediated nomadic work practices in the knowledge economy.
Chapter 26 I-Gate: Interperception – Get all the Environments............................................................................. 397 Rummenigge Dantas, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil Luiz Marcos Gonçalves, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil Claudio Schneider, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil Aquiles Burlamaqui, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil Ricardo Dias, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil Hugo Sena, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil Julio cesar Melo, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil Chapter 26 introduces the I-GATE architecture, a new approach, which includes a set of rules and software architecture, to connect users from different interfaces and devices in the same virtual environment, transparently, even with low capacity of resources. The system detects the user resources and provides transformations on the data in order for its visualization in 3D, 2D and textual-only (1D) interfaces. This allows users from any interface to get a connection in the system using any device and to access and exchange information with other users (including ones with other interface types) in a straightforward way, without need to changing hardware or software. The authors formalize the problem, including modeling, implementation, and usage of the system, also introducing some applications that they have created and implemented in order to evaluate the proposal. Authors have used these applications in cell phones, PDAs, Digital Television, and heterogeneous computers, using the same architecture, with success. Chapter 27 CONNECTOR: A Geolocated Mobile Social Service......................................................................... 414 Pedro Almeida, University of Aveiro, Portugal Jorge Abreu, University of Aveiro, Portugal Margarida Almeida, University of Aveiro, Portugal Maria Antunes, University of Aveiro, Portugal Lidia Silva, University of Aveiro, Portugal Melissa Saraiva, University of Aveiro, Portugal Jorge Teixeira, University of Aveiro, Portugal Fernando Ramos, University of Aveiro, Portugal The widespread and availability of increasingly powerful mobile devices is contributing for the incorporation of new services and features on our daily communications and social relationships. In this context, geolocation of users and points of interest in mobile devices may contribute, in a natural way, to support either the mediation of remote conversations as the promotion of face-to-face meetings between users, leveraging social networks. The CONNECTOR system is based on geolocation data (people, content and activities), enabling users to create and develop their personal relations with other members of the CONNECTOR social network. Users, maps, sharing features and multimedia content are actors in this social network allowing CONNECTOR to address the promotion of geolocated social networks driven by physical proximity and common interests among users. Chapter 27 discusses the work undertaken for the conceptualization and development of the CONNECTOR system. Preliminary evaluation results along with usage contexts are also presented. The chapter concludes with a discussion about future developments in geolocation and personalization in mobile communication services.
Chapter 28 Providing VoIP and IPTV Services in WLANs................................................................................... 426 Miguel Edo, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Alejandro Canovas, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Miguel Garcia, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Jaime Lloret, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Nowadays, triple-play services are offered in both wireless and wired networks. The network convergence and the new services such as VoIP and IPTV are a reality. However, the future of these networks will have a different concept, the ubiquity. The solutions must be based on the structures and current environments to carry out those challenges in a correct way. In order to reach this ubiquity, the science community has to take into account that its implementation should not assume a high cost to the user and that the system must comply with the quality of service measurements to satisfy the user. Chapter 28 introduces the main VoIP and IPTV (IP Television) transmission protocols and the compression formats most used as also the bandwidth needed. The goal is to provide ubiquity into multimedia scenarios in WLANs. Authors will carry out tests to guarantee the appropriate values in some network parameters such jitter, delay, number of lost packets and enough effective bandwidth that should be satisfied. They demonstrate the measurements taken from several test benches. They show the parameter values that the devices should perform in order to stay connected from anywhere at any time to these services. Chapter 29 SIe-Health, e-Health Information System............................................................................................ 445 Juan Carlos González Moreno, University of Vigo, Spain Loxo Lueiro Astray, University of Vigo, Spain Rubén Romero González, University of Vigo, Spain Cesar Parguiñas Portas, University of Vigo, Spain Castor Sánchez Chao, University of Vigo, Spain In recent years, the incessant development of new communication technologies has provided a better way for accessing information and a countless amount of useful opportunities. One of the sectors that have a great potential to use and exploit this kind of technologies is the healthcare sector. Nowadays, the application of all these new technologies to support the clinical procedures has taken part in the definition of a new concept known as e-Health. This concept involves a lot of different services related with the medicine/health terms and the information technologies. However, to provide emergency transportation with better care capabilities to the patient is something that still has a lot to improve. Within this context SIe-Health comes into being a software platform oriented for developing Telemedicine solutions. The solution model proposed in this chapter allows remote assistance for a mobile health emergency, integrating in this service electro-medical devices and videoconference services. Chapter 30 Combining Location Tracking and RFID Tagging toward an Improved Research Infrastructure...........459 Greg Wilson, Virginia Tech, USA Scott McCrickard, Virginia Tech, USA
The popularity of mobile computing creates new opportunities for information sharing and collaboration through technologies like radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and location awareness technologies. Chapter 30 discusses how these technologies, which provide subtly different information, can be used together toward increased benefit to users. This work introduces technologies for RFID and location awareness, including a survey of projects. The authors describe advantages of combining these technologies, illustrated through our system, TagIt, that uses these technologies in a traditional research poster environment to provide a rich multimedia experience and encourage ongoing feedback from poster viewers. An overview of TagIt is provided, including user commenting and information sharing capabilities that make use of RFID and location information. User feedback and an expert review highlights how TagIt could benefit authors, information consumers, and the research community, leading to future directions for the research community. Chapter 31 Model and Infrastructure for Communications in Context-Aware Services........................................ 472 Cristina Rodriguez-Sanchez, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain Susana Borromeo, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain Juan Hernandez-Tamames, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain The appearance of concepts such as “Ambient Intelligent”, “Ubiquitous Computing” and “ContextAwareness” is causing the development of a new type of services called “Context-Aware Services” that in turn may affect users of mobile communications. This technology revolution is a complex process because of the heterogeneity of contents, devices, objects, technologies, resources and users that can be coexist at the same local environment. The novel approach in Chapter 31 is the development of a ”Local Infrastructure” in order to provide intelligent, transparent and adaptable services to the user and solves the problem of local context control. Authors present a conceptual model for development of local infrastructure, an architecture design to control the service offered by the local infrastructure. This infrastructure proposed consists of an intelligent device network to link the personal portable device with the contextual services. The device design is modular, flexible, scalable, adaptable and reconfigurable remotely in order to tolerate new demand services whenever is needed. Finally, the result suggests that authors will be able to develop a wide range of new and useful applications, not conceived at origin. Chapter 32 Network Mobility and Mobile Applications Development................................................................. 487 Rui Rijo, IPLeiria, Portugal Nuno Veiga, IPLeiria, Portugal Silvio Bernardes, IPLeiria, Portugal The use of mobile devices with possible connection to the Internet is increasing tremendously. This mobility poses new challenges at various levels, including hardware, network services, and the development of applications. The user searches small and lightweight devices, easy to use, and with vast autonomy in terms of energy. She/He seeks also to connect the Internet “every time, everywhere”, possibly using different access technologies. Given the interface limitations, and processing capabilities of small mobile devices, the software and the operating system used must be necessarily adapted. Chapter 32 overviews the mobility area, provides deep insight in the field, and presents the main existing prob-
lems. Mobility and the development of mobile applications are closed related. The advances in network mobility lead to different approaches in the mobile applications development. The chapter proposes a model for developing mobile applications, based on our research. Chapter 33 Building Mobile Sensor Networks Using Smartphones and Web Services: Ramifications and Development Challenges.............................................................................................................. 502 Hamilton Turner, Vanderbilt University, USA Jules White, Vanderbilt University, USA Brian Dougherty, Vanderbilt University, USA Doug Schmidt, Vanderbilt University, USA Wireless sensor networks are composed of geographically dispersed sensors that work together to monitor physical or environmental conditions. In addition, wireless sensor networks are used in many industrial, social, and regulatory applications, including industrial process monitoring and control, environment and habitat monitoring, healthcare, home automation, and traffic control. Developers of wireless sensor networks face a number of programming and deployment challenges. Chapter 33 shows how smartphones can help reduce the development, operation, and maintenance costs of wireless sensor networks, while also enabling these networks to use web services, high-level programming APIs, and increased hardware capability, such as powerful microprocessors. Moreover, this chapter examines key challenges associated with developing and maintaining a large wireless sensor network and presents a novel smartphone wireless sensor network that uses smartphones as sensor nodes. The work is validated in the context of Wreck Watch, which is a smartphone-based sensor network for detecting traffic accidents that authors use to demonstrate solutions to multiple challenges in current wireless sensor networks. The authors also describe common pitfalls of using smartphones as sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks and summarize how have addressed these pitfalls in Wreck Watch. Chapter 34 Technologies to Improve the Quality of Handovers: Ontologies, Contexts and Mobility Management................................................................................................................... 522 Edson Moreira, University of São Paulo, Brazil Bruno Kimura, University of São Paulo, Brazil Renata Maria Vanni, University of São Paulo, Brazil Roberto Yokoyama, University of São Paulo, Brazil Modern life makes people internet-dependents. They want to move connected and care for always getting the best options for connectivity, hoping between providers. Freedom for choosing providers and the business options which these exchanges can offer are the motivations for Chapter 34. After pointing out some characteristics which make the basics of the current handover technologies, we describe an information infrastructure, based on context and ontologies which can be used to foster an intelligent, efficient and profitable scenario for managing handovers in the Next Generation Networks. Some experiments are described and the potential of using these technologies are evaluated.
Chapter 35 Making Location-Aware Computing Working Accurately in Smart Spaces....................................... 539 Teddy Mantoro, International Islamic University Malaysia, Malaysia Media Ayu, International Islamic University Malaysia, Malaysia Maarten Weyn, Artesis University College of Antwerpen, Belgium In smart environments, making a location-aware personal computing working accurately is a way of getting close to the pervasive computing vision. The best candidate to determine a user location in indoor environment is by using IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) signals, since it is more and more widely available and installed on most mobile devices used by users. Unfortunately, the signal strength, signals quality and noise of Wi-Fi, in worst scenario, it fluctuates up to 33% because of the reflection, refraction, temperature, humidity, the dynamic environment, etc. The authors present in Chapter 35 their current development on a light-weight algorithm, which is easy, simple but robust in producing the determination of user location using WiFi signals. The algorithm is based on “multiple observers” on ηk-Nearest Neighbour. The authors extend the approach in the estimation indoor-user location by using combination of different technologies, i.e. WiFi, GPS, GSM and Accelerometer. The algorithm is based on opportunistic localization algorithm and fuse different sensor data in order to be able to use the data which is available at the user position and processable in a mobile device. Chapter 36 User Pro-Activities Based on Context History.................................................................................... 558 Teddy Mantoro, International Islamic University Malaysia, Malaysia Media Ayu, International Islamic University Malaysia, Malaysia Context-aware computing is a class of mobile computing that can sense its physical environment and adapt its behavior accordingly; it is a component of the ubiquitous or pervasive computing environment that has become apparent with innovations and challenges. Chapter 36 reviews the concept of contextaware computing, with focus on the user activities that benefit from context history. How user activities in the smart environment can make use of context histories in applications that apply the concept of context prediction integrated with user pro-activity is explored. A brief summary of areas which benefit from these technologies as well as corresponding issues are also investigated. Section 2 Emerging Technologies Chapter 37 Research Challenge of Locally Computed Ubiquitous Data Mining.................................................. 576 Aysegul Cayci, Sabanci University, Turkey João Bártolo Gomes, Universitad Politecnica, Spain Andrea Zanda, Universitad Politecnica, Spain Ernestina Menasalvas, Universitad Politecnica, Spain Santiago Eibe, Universitad Politecnica, Spain
Advances in wireless, sensor, mobile and wearable technologies present new challenges for data mining research on providing mobile applications with intelligence. Autonomy and adaptability requirements are the two most important challenges for data mining in this new environment. In this chapter, the authors analyse the challenges of designing ubiquitous data mining services by examining the issues and problems while paying special attention to context and resource awareness. The authors focused on the autonomous execution of a data mining algorithm and analyzed the situational factors that influence the quality of the result. Already existing solutions in this area and future directions of research are also covered. Chapter 38 Emerging Wireless Networks for Social Applications......................................................................... 595 Raúl Aquino, University of Colima, México Luis Villaseñor, CICESE Research Centre, México Víctor Rangel, National Autonomous University of Mexico, México Miguel García, University of Colima, México Artur Edwards, University of Colima, México Chapter 38 describes the implementation and performance evaluation of a novel routing protocol called Pandora, designed for social applications, and that can be implemented in a broad number of devices, such as commercial wireless routers and laptops. It also provides a robust backbone integrating and sharing data, voice and video between computers and mobile devices. Pandora offers great performance with both fixed and mobile devices and includes important features such as: geographic positioning, residual battery energy monitoring, and bandwidth utilization. In addition, Pandora also considers the number of devices attached to the network. Pandora is experimentally evaluated in a testbed with laptops for the first stage and commercial wireless routers for the second stage. The main goal of Pandora is to provide a reliable backbone for social applications requiring a quality of service (QoS) guarantee. With this in mind, the following evaluation of Pandora considers the following types of traffic sources: transport control protocol (TCP), voice, video and user datagram protocol (UDP) without marks. Pandora is also compared with different queuing disciplines, including: priority queuing discipline (PRIO), hierarchical token bucket (HTB) and DSMARK. Finally, an Internet radio transmission is employed to test the network re-configurability. Results show that queuing the PRIO and HTB disciplines, which prioritizes UDP traffic, performed the best. Chapter 39 An Approach to Mobile Grid Platforms for the Development and Support of Complex Ubiquitous Application........................................................................................................ 617 Carlo Bertolli, University of Pisa, Italy Daniele Buono, University of Pisa, Italy Gabriele Mencagli, University of Pisa, Italy Marco Vanneschi, University of Pisa, Italy Several complex and time-critical applications require the existence of novel distributed, heterogeneous and dynamic platforms composed of a variety of fixed and mobile processing nodes and networks. Such platforms, that can be called Pervasive Mobile Grids, aim to merge the features of Pervasive Comput-
ing and High-performance Grid Computing onto a new emerging paradigm. In this chapter we study a methodology for the design and the development of high-performance, adaptive and context-aware applications. Chapter 39 describes a programming model approach, and the authors compare it with other existing research works in the field of Pervasive Mobile Computing, discussing the rationales of the requirements and the features of a novel programming model for the target platforms and applications. In order to exemplify the proposed methodology, the authors introduce the programming framework ASSISTANT, and provide some interesting future directions in this research field. Chapter 40 Towards a Programming Model for Ubiquitous Computing............................................................... 634 Jorge Barbosa, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), Brazil Fabiane Dillenburg, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil Alex Garzão, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), Brazil Gustavo Lermen, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), Brazil Cristiano Costa, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), Brazil Potentially, in the mobile computing scenario, the users can move in different environments and the applications can automatically explore their surroundings. This kind of context-aware application is emerging, but is not yet widely disseminated. Based on perceived context, the application can modify its behavior. This process, in which software modifies itself according to sensed data, is named Adaptation and constitutes the core of Ubiquitous Computing. The ubiquitous computing scenario brings many new problems such as coping with the limited processing power of mobile devices, frequent disconnections, the migration of code and tasks between heterogeneous devices, and others. Current practical approaches to the ubiquitous computing problem usually rely upon traditional computing paradigms conceived back when distributed applications where not a concern. Holoparadigm (Holo) was proposed as a model to support the development of distributed systems. Based on Holo concepts, a new programming language called HoloLanguage (HoloL) was created. The authors propose the use of Holo for developing and executing ubiquitous applications, explore the HoloL for ubiquitous programming and propose a full platform to develop and execute Holo programs. The execution environment is based on a virtual machine that implements the concepts proposed by Holo. Chapter 41 An Agent-Based Operational Virtual Enterprise Framework Enabled by RFID................................. 649 Özgür Ünver, TOBB-University of Economics and Technology, Turkey Bahram Lotfi Sadigh, Middle East Technical University, Turkey The Virtual Enterprise (VE) is a collaboration model between multiple business partners in a value chain that aims to cope with turbulent business environments, mainly characterized by demand unpredictability, shortening product lifecycles, and intense cost pressures. The VE model is particularly viable and applicable for SME and industry parks containing multiple SMEs that have different vertical competencies. As small firms collaborate effectively under VE model, it will be only possible to emerge products by joining their diverse competencies and mitigate the effects of market turbulence by minimizing their investment. A typical VE model has four phases; opportunity capture, formation, operation, and dissolution. The goal of this chapter is to present a conceptual VE framework, focusing
on operation phase, that incorporates Multi Agent Systems (MAS) and Radio Frequency Identification Systems (RFID) which are emerging from research to industry with a great momentum. First, state of the art for VE and the two key enabling technologies are covered in detail. After presenting conceptual view of the framework, an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) view is also given to enhance technical integration with available industry standards and solutions. Finally, process views of how a VE can operate utilizing agent based and RFID systems in order to fulfill operational requirements, are presented. Chapter 42 Ontological Dimensions of Semantic Mobile Web 2.0: First Principles............................................. 667 Gonzalo Aranda-Corral, University of Sevilla, Spain Joaquín Borrego-Díaz, University of Sevilla, Spain Chapter 42 advances, from the point of view of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, an analysis of which ontological dimensions are needed to develop Mobile Web 2.0 on top of Semantic Web. This analysis will be particularly focused on social networks and it will try to make an outlook about the new knowledge challenges on this field. Some of these new challenges will be linked to Semantic Web context, while others will be inherent to Semantic Mobile Web 2.0. Chapter 43 Unobtrusive Interaction with Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing Systems through Kinetic User Interfaces..................................................................................................................................... 689 Vincenzo Pallotta, Webster University, Switzerland Unobtrusiveness is a key factor in usability of mobile and ubiquitous computing systems. These systems are made of several ambient and mobile devices whose goal is supporting everyday life users’ activities, hopefully without interfering with them. The chapter addresses the topic of obtrusiveness by assessing its impact in the design of interfaces for mobile and ubiquitous computing systems. Authors discuss how unobtrusive interfaces can be designed by means of Kinetic User Interfaces: an emerging interaction paradigm where input to system is provided through coordinated motion of objects and people in the physical space. Chapter 44 Impact of Advances on Computing and Communication Systems in Automotive Testing................. 703 Luís Serrano, Polithecnic Institute Leiria, Portugal José Costa, University Coimbra, Portugal Manuel Silva, University Coimbra, Portugal A huge amount of information is used nowadays by modern vehicles, and it may be accessed through an On Board Diagnosis (OBD) connection. A technique using the already installed OBD system to communicate with the vehicle together with a Global Position System (GPS) provides reliable data which allow a detailed analysis of real on road tests. Different kinds of circulation circuits (urban, extra-urban and highway) were analyzed in Chapter 44, using the capabilities of OBD II installed on the tested vehicles. OBD provides an important set of information, namely related with data on the engine, fuel
consumption, chassis and auxiliary systems and also on combustion efficiency. The use of GPS in all the road tests performed provides important information to further determine the more sustainable from all the different solutions tested, considering the different situations imposed on each circuit. It is a fact that bench tests or a chassis dynamometer allow a fine control of the operation conditions; however the simulation is not as real as on the road. So the present methodology will allow the possibility to perform tests on the road, allowing enough control on vehicles and providing complete information of the chosen route and of the trip history. This is a possibility that ensures new tools with more reliable data which can give faster answers for the development of high efficiency, economic and environmentally neutral automotive technologies. Chapter 45 RFID and NFC in the Future of Mobile Computing........................................................................... 719 Diogo Simões, Movensis, Portugal Vitor Rodrigues, Movensis, Portugal Luis Veiga, INESC ID / Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal Paulo Ferreira, INESC ID / Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology consists of a tag that can be used to identify an animal, a person or a product, and a device responsible for transmitting, receiving and decoding the radio waves. RFID tags work in two different modes: they wake up when they receive a radio wave signal and reflect it (Passive Mode) or they emit their own signal (Active Mode). The tags store information which allows univocally identifying something or someone. That information is stored in an IC (Integrated Circuit) which is connected to an antenna, responsible for transmitting the information. An evolution of this technology is the Near Field Communication (NFC). It consists of a contactless Smart Card technology, based in short-range RFID. Currently, there are mobile phones with NFC embedded in such a way that they work both as a tag and as a NFC reader. These technologies will be widely available both in mobile phones and other devices (e.g. personal digital assistants, etc.) in the near future allowing us to get closer to a ubiquitous and pervasive world. This chapter describes the most important aspects of RFID and NFC technology, illustrating their applicative potential, and provides a vision of the future in which the virtual and real worlds merge together as if an osmosis took place. Chapter 46 A Multi-Loop Development Process for a Wearable Computing System in Autonomous Logistics......................................................................................................................... 738 Jakub Piotrowski, Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik, Germany Carmen Ruthenbeck, Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik, Germany Florian Harjes, Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik, Germany Bernd Scholz-Reiter, Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik, Germany Chapter 46 examines a multi-loop development process for a wearable computing system within a new paradigm in logistic applications. The implementation of this system will be demonstrated by an example from the field of autonomous logistics for automobile logistics. The development process is depicted from selecting and combining hardware through to the adjustment to both user and operative environment. Further, this chapter discusses critical success factors like robustness and flexibility. The objective is to present problems and challenges as well as a possible approach to cope with them.
Section 3 Critical Success Factors Chapter 47 Collaboration within Social Dimension of Computing: Theoretical Background, Empirical Findings and Practical Development.................................................................................. 760 Andreas Ahrens, University of Technology, Business and Design, Germany Jeļena Zaščerinska, University of Latvia, Latvia Olaf Bassus, University of Technology, Business and Design, Germany A proper development of computing which penetrate our society more thoroughly with the availability of broadband services is provided by varied cooperative networks. However, the success of social dimension of computing requires collaboration within a multicultural environment to be considered. Aim of Chapter 47 is to analyze collaboration within the social dimension of computing on the pedagogical discourse. The meaning of the key concepts of social dimension of computing, collaboration and its factors is studied within the search for the success of social dimension. The manuscript introduces the study conducted within the Baltic Summer School Technical Informatics and Information Technology in 2009. The conducted explorative research comprises four stages: exploration of the contexts of collaboration, analysis of the students’ needs (content analysis), data processing, analysis and data interpretation, and analysis of the results and elaboration of conclusions and hypothesis for further studies. Chapter 48 Critical Factors in Defining the Mobile Learning Model: An Innovative Process for Hybrid Learning at the Tecnologico de Monterrey, a Mexican University......................................... 774 Violeta Chirino-Barceló, Tecnologico de Monterrey Mexico, Mexico Arturo Molina, Tecnologico de Monterrey Mexico, Mexico Many factors converge when attempting to define the most adequate mobile learning model to be applied in a face-to-face university environment. As far as innovation related processes go, the implementation of mobile learning, implies defining a road map on the basis of strategic planning. It is also important to apply an action research approach in the implementation process of the model. In analyzing in depth this innovative mobile learning process, there are key factors to consider. First, there are factors related to the technology necessary for the implementation of the model—both hard and soft requirements. Second, there are cultural issues related to the use of non-native internet professors of innovative technologies. Finally, there are challenges related to defining, exactly, those educational strategies to be handled through mobile devices. Chapter 48 focuses on the critical factors involved in integrating mobile learning into a hybrid educational model at a Mexican university. Chapter 49 Critical Human Factors on Mobile Applications for Tourism and Entertainment............................... 793 Pedro Campos, University of Madeira, Portugal The purpose of Chapter 49 is to research some principles that can guide the design, development and marketing of mobile applications, with a particular focus on the tourism and entertainment applica-
tion domains. This research also fills a gap concerning impact studies of mobile applications, since the majority of the literature available today is more focused on the design and development process and results. Besides describing a set of novel mobile applications, we aim at providing an overview on innovation processed used, and conducting several experiences, gathering results from questionnaires, surveys, log data and our own observations. Regarding the mobile tourism domain, the author studied the impact of media visibility, the impact of novel interaction paradigms. Regarding the mobile entertainment applications, he focused on studying the impact brought that realism and graphics quality have on mobile games. Chapter 50 Internet Surveys: Opportunities and Challenges.................................................................................. 805 Paula Vicente, UNIDE, ISCTE – Lisbon University Institute, Portugal Elizabeth Reis, UNIDE, ISCTE – Lisbon University Institute, Portugal Internet surveys offer important advantages over traditional survey methods: they can accomplish large samples within a relatively short period of time, questionnaires may have visual and navigational functionalities impossible to implement in paper-and-pencil questionnaires, data is more efficiently processed since it already comes in electronic format and costs can be lower. But the use of the Internet for survey purposes raises important concerns related to population coverage, lack of suitable sampling frames and non-response. Despite its problems, Internet-based surveys are growing and will continue to expand presenting researchers with the challenge of finding the best way to adapt the methods and principles established in survey methodology to this new mode of data collection in order to make best use of it. Chapter 50 describes the positive features of the Internet for survey activity and examines some of the challenges of conducting surveys via the Internet by looking at methodological issues such as coverage, sample selection, non-response and data quality. Chapter 51 Evolvable Production Systems: A Coalition-Based Production Approach.......................................... 821 Marcus Bjelkemyr, The Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden Antonio Maffei, The Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden Mauro Onori, The Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden The purpose of Chapter 51 is to provide broad view of the rationale, fundamental principles, current developments and applications for Evolvable Production Systems (EPS). Special attention is given to how complexity is handled, the use of agent based and wireless technology, and how economical issues are affected by having an evolvable system. The rationale for EPS is based on current road mapping efforts, which have clearly underlined that true industrial sustainability requires far higher levels of system autonomy and adaptivity than what can be achieved within current production system paradigms. Since its inception in 2002 as a next generation of production systems, the EPS concept has been further developed and tested to emerge as a production system paradigm with technological solutions and mechanisms that support sustainability. Technically, EPS is based on the idea of using several re-configurable, process-oriented, agent-based and wireless intelligent modules of low granularity. This allows for a continuous adaption and evolution of the production system and the ability to explore emergent behavior of the system, which are imperative to remain fit with regards to the system environment.
Section 4 New Business Models Chapter 52 Viable Business Models for M-Commerce: The Key Components..................................................... 837 Jiaxiang Gan, University of Auckland, New Zealand Jairo Gutierrez, Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar, Colombia As mobile applications increase in popularity, the issue of how to build viable business models for the m-commerce industry is becoming a clear priority for both organizations and researchers. In order to address this issue, this chapter reports on five mini cases used as a guideline, and applies the theoretical business model from Chesbrough and Rosenbloom (2002) to each of them to find out the most important components of viable business models for their m-commerce applications. The study then uses cross cases analysis as a research tool to compare and contrast each of the mini cases and to find out how the different organizations fit within the researched theoretical business model. Finally, this chapter confirms that there are 7 important components of viable business models for m-commerce which are: value proposition, market segment, value chain, profit potential, value network, competitive strategy and firm capabilities. This study also highlights the fact that the public visibility of these 7 components is uneven. Some components such as value proposition, value chain, value network and firm’s capabilities are more likely to be presented in public by organizations. However, aspects such as cost structure and profit potential, market segment and competitive strategy are more likely to be hidden from the public due to their commercial sensitivity. Chapter 53 A Service-Based Framework to Model Mobile Enterprise Architectures........................................... 853 Jose Delgado, Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal Mobility is a relatively recent topic in the enterprise arena, but thanks to the widespread use of cell phones it has already changed much of the business landscape. It should be integrated in enterprise architectures (EAs) as an intrinsic feature and not as an add-on or as an afterthought transition. Current EA frameworks were not designed with mobility in mind and are usually based on the process paradigm, emphasizing functionality. Although the issue of establishing a systematized migration path from a non-mobile EA to a mobile one has already been tackled, the need for mobile-native EA modeling frameworks is still felt. Chapter 53 presents and discusses a resource-based and service-oriented metamodel and EA framework, in which mobility is introduced naturally from scratch, constituting the basis for some guidelines on which EA resources should be mobilized. Several simple scenarios are presented in the light of this metamodel and framework. Chapter 54 Research-Based Insights Inform Change in IBM M-Learning Strategy............................................. 871 Nabeel Ahmad, IBM Center for Advanced Learning, USA Although mobile phones have become an extension of the workplace, organizations are still exploring their effectiveness for employee training and development. A 2009 joint collaborative study between
Columbia University (New York, USA) and IBM of 400 IBM employees’ use of mobile phones revealed unexpected insights into how employees use mobile applications to improve job performance. The findings are reshaping IBM Learning’s mobile technologies strategy for networking, collaboration, and skills improvement. This chapter reveals the study’s results and IBM’s new direction for mlearning, highlighting IBM’s preparedness for a shift in its organizational learning model potentiated by ubiquitous access and mobility. Chapter 55 Location Based E-Commerce System: An Architecture...................................................................... 881 Nuno André Osório Liberato, UTAD, Portugal João Eduardo Quintela Alves de Sousa Varajão, UTAD, Portugal Emanuel Soares Peres Correia, UTAD, Portugal Maximino Esteves Correia Bessa, UTAD, Portugal Location-based mobile services (LBMS) are at present an ever growing trend, as found in the latest and most popular mobile applications launched. They are, indeed, supported by the hasty evolution of mobile devices capabilities; by users demand; and, lastly, by market drive. With e-commerce, products and services started arriving to potential customers through desktop computers, where they can be bought and fast delivered to a given address. However, expressions such as “being mobile”, “always connected”, “anytime anywhere” that already characterize life in the present will certainly continue to do so in the near future. Meanwhile, mobile devices centred commerce services seem to be the next step. Therefore, this chapter presents a system architecture designed for location-based e-commerce systems. These systems, where location plays the most important role, enable a remote products/services search, based in user parameters: after a product search, shops with that products are returned in the search results and are displayed in a map, around the user present location; and services like obtaining more information, reserving and purchasing are made available as well. This concept represents a mix between traditional client-oriented commerce and faceless mass-oriented e-commerce, enabling a proximity-based user-contextualized system, being well capable of conveying significant advantages and facilities to both service-providers/retailers and users. Section 5 Security Chapter 56 Overview of Security Issues in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks.............................................................. 894 José María De Fuentes, Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain Ana Isabel González-Tablas, Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain Arturo Ribagorda, Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are a promising communication scenario. Several new applications are envisioned, which will improve traffic management and safety. Nevertheless, those applications have stringent security requirements, as they affect road traffic safety. Moreover, VANETs
face several security threats. As VANETs present some unique features (e.g. high mobility of nodes, geographic extension, etc.) traditional security mechanisms are not always suitable. Because of that, a plethora of research contributions have been presented so far. This chapter aims to describe and analyze the most representative VANET security developments. Chapter 57 Modelling of Location-Aware Access Control Rules.......................................................................... 912 Michael Decker, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany Access control in the domain of information system security refers to the process of deciding whether a particular request made by a user to perform a particular operation on a particular object under the control of the system should be allowed or denied. For example, the access control component of a file server might have to decide whether user “Alice” is allowed to perform the operation “delete” on the object “document.txt”. For traditional access control this decision is based on the evaluation of the identity of the user and attributes of the object. The novel idea of location-aware access control is also to consider the user’s current location which is determined by a location system like GPS. The main purpose of Chapter 57 is to present several approaches for the modeling of location-aware access control rules. Chapter 58 Secure Techniques for Remote Reconfiguration of Wireless Embedded Systems.............................. 930 Abdellah Touhafi, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium An Braeken, Erasmushogeschool Brussel, Belgium Gianluca Cornetta, Universidad San Pablo-CEU, Spain Nele Mentens, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium Kris Steenhaut, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium The aim of Chapter 58 is to give a thorough overview of secure remote reconfiguration technologies for wireless embedded systems, and of the communication standard commonly used in those systems. In particular, authors focus on basic security mechanisms both at hardware and protocol level. We will discuss the possible threats and their corresponding impact level. Different countermeasures for avoiding these security issues are explained. Finally, the chapter presents a complete and compact solution for a service-oriented architecture enabling secure remote reconfiguration of wireless embedded systems, called the STRES system. Chapter 59 Secure Routing and Mobility in Future IP Networks.......................................................................... 952 Kaj Grahn, Arcada University of Applied Sciences, Finland Jonny Karlsson, Arcada University of Applied Sciences, Finland Göran Pulkkis, Arcada University of Applied Sciences, Finland The evolution of computer networking is moving from static wired networking towards wireless, mobile, infrastructureless, and ubiquitous networking. In next-generation computer networks, new mobility features such as, seamless roaming, vertical handover, and moving networks are introduced. Secu-
rity is a major challenge in developing mobile and infrastructureless networks. Specific security threats in next-generation networks are related to the wireless access mediums, routing, and mobility features. Chapter 59 identifies these threats, and discuss the state of the art of security research and standardization within the area, proposing security architectures for mobile networking. A survey of security in routing is provided with special focus on mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The security of currently relevant protocols for management or node and network mobility, Mobile IP (MIP), Network Mobility (NEMO), Mobile Internet Key Exchange (MOBIKE), Host Identity Protocol (HIP), Mobile Stream Control Transmission Protocol (mSCTP), Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP), and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), is described. Section 6 Applications, Surveys and Case Studies Chapter 60 Evaluation of a Mobile Platform to Support Collaborative Learning: Case Study............................. 974 Carlos Quental, Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, Portugal Luis Gouveia, University Fernando Pessoa, Portugal In an educational context, technological applications and their supporting infrastructures have been evolved in a way that the use of learning objects is no longer limited to a personal computer, but has been extended to a number of mobile devices. Such evolution leads to the creation of a technological model called m-learning that offers great benefits to education. This educational model has been developed over the recent years, which resulted in several research projects and some commercial products. This chapter describes the (re)use of an adapted platform from an API of MLE (Mobile Learning Engine), to create tests, quizzes, forums, SMS, audio, video, mobile learning objects, in combination with a learning platform in a particular setting. MLE is a special m-learning application for mobile phones (a J2ME application) that can access a LMS (Learning Management System) and use most of its activities and resources, and add new, even innovative, activities. With J2ME one can store, use content and learn without the need of further network access and even use interactive questions that can be directly solved on mobile devices. The MLE enables one to use the mobile phone as a constant way of learning. As a consequence it is possible to use every spare time to learn, no matter where we are, providing new opportunities to enhance learning. Chapter 61 Power Issues and Energy Scavenging in Mobile Wireless Ad-Hoc and Sensor Networks................. 994 Gianluca Cornetta, Universidad San Pablo-CEU, Spain Abdellah Touhafi, Erasmushogheschool Brussel, Belgium David J. Santos, Universidad San Pablo-CEU, Spain José Manuel Vázquez, Universidad San Pablo-CEU, Spain Wireless ad-hoc and sensor networks are experiencing a widespread diffusion due to their flexibility and broad range of potential uses. Nowadays they are the underlying core technology of many industrial and remote sensing applications. Such networks rely on battery-operated nodes with a limited
lifetime. Although, in the last decade, a significant research effort has been carried out to improve the energy efficiency and the power consumption of the sensor nodes, new power sources have to be considered to improve node lifetime and to guarantee a high network reliability and availability. Energy scavenging is the process by which the energy derived from external sources is captured, translated into an electric charge and stored internally to a node. At the moment, these new power sources are not intended to replace the batteries, since they cannot generate enough energy; however, working together with the conventional power sources they can significantly improve node lifetime. Low-power operation is the result of a complex cross-layer optimization process, for this reason, this chapter thoroughly reviews all the traditional methods aimed at reducing power consumption at network, MAC and PHY levels of the TCP stack, to understand advantages and limitations of such techniques, and to justify the need of alternative power sources that may allow, in the future, the design of completely self-sustained and autonomous sensor nodes. Chapter 62 A Low Cost Wireless Sensors Network with Low-Complexity and Fast-Prototyping...................... 1021 João Carmo, University of Minho, Portugal José Correia, University of Minho, Portugal This chapter presents a low cost/fast prototyping wireless sensors network that was designed for a huge range of applications and making use of low cost commercial of the shelf components. Such applications includes industrial measurements, biomedical, domestic monitoring, remote sensing, among others. The concept of the wireless sensor network is presented and simultaneously, hot topics and their implementation are discussed. Such topics are valuable tools and can’t be discarded when a wireless sensors network is planed. By the contrary, such tools must be taken in account to make the communications between the nodes and the base station the best possible reliable. The architecture, protocols and the reasons that were behind the selection of the components are also discussed. The chapter also presents performance metrics that are related to with the physical characteristics of sensors and with the radio specificity. Microcontrollers with a RISC architecture are used by the network nodes to control the communication and the data acquisition and operate in the 433 MHz ISM band with ASK modulation. Also, in order to improve the communication and to minimise the lost of data, it is predicted to put the wireless nodes to handle line and source coding schemes. Chapter 63 Unreliable Failure Detectors for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks.............................................................. 1039 Luciana Arantes, University Paris 6, France Fabiola Greve, Federal University of Bahia, Brazil Pierre Sens, University Paris 6, France Failure detection is an important abstraction for the development of fault-tolerant middleware, such as group communication toolkits, replication and transaction services. Unreliable failure detector (namely, FD) can be seen as an oracle which provides information about process failures. The dynamics and self-organization of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) introduce new restrictions and challenges for the implementation of FDs with which static traditional networks do not have to cope. It is worth mentioning that in some way, fault tolerance is more critical for MANETs than for the latter, since wireless
network can present high error rates and mobile nodes are more prone to failures, physical damages or transient disconnections. The aim of this chapter is thus to discuss the impact of all these characteristics, intrinsic to MANET, in the implementation of FDs. It presents a survey of the few works about FD implementations for wireless networks, including the different possible assumptions to overcome the dynamics and lack of both global view and synchrony of MANETs. Chapter 64 Mission-Aware Adaptive Communication for Collaborative Mobile Entities................................... 1056 Jérôme Lacouture, Université de Toulouse, France Ismael Bouassida Rodriguez, Université de Toulouse, France Jean-Paul Arcangeli, Paul Sabatier University, France Christophe Chassot, Université de Toulouse, France Thierry Desprats, Paul Sabatier University, France Khalil Drira, Université de Toulouse, France Francisco Garijo, Université de Toulouse, France Victor Noel, Paul Sabatier University, France Michelle Sibilla, Paul Sabatier University, France Catherine Tessier, ONERA Centre de Toulouse – DCSD, France Adaptation of communication is needed to maintain the connectivity and quality of communication in group-wide collaborative activities. This becomes quite a challenge to handle when mobile entities are part of a wireless environment, in which responsiveness and availability of the communication system are required. In this chapter, these challenges are addressed within the context of the ROSACE project where mobile ground and flying robots have to collaborate either between themselves or with remote artificial and human actors during save and rescue missions in the event of disasters such as forest fires. This chapter presents the first results. The final goal is to propose new concepts, models and architectures that supports cooperative adaptation which is aware of the mission being executed. Thus, the communication system can be adequately adapted in response to predictable or unpredictable evolutions of the activity requirements and to the unpredictable changes in the communication resource constraints. Chapter 65 OntoHealth: An Ontology Applied to Pervasive Hospital Environments.......................................... 1077 Giovani Librelotto, Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil Iara Augustin, Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil Jonas Gassen, Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil Guilherme Kurtz, Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil Leandro Freitas, Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil Ricardo Martini, Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil Renato Azevedo, Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil In the last years ontologies are being used in the development of pervasive computing applications. It is habitual their use for facilitating the interoperability among context-aware applications and the entities that may enter in the context at any time. This chapter presents OntoHealth: an ontology applied to health pervasive environment and a tool to its processing. The main idea is that a hospital could be
seen as this pervasive environment, where someone, through ubiquitous computing, engages a range of computational devices and systems simultaneously, in the course of ordinary activities, and may not necessarily even be aware that they are doing so. With the proposed ontology and the tool for its processing, the medical tasks can be shared by all components of this pervasive environment. Chapter 66 Adoption of Mobile and Information Technology in an Energy Utility in Brazil............................. 1091 Osvaldo Garcia, Pontificia Universidade Católica do PR, Brazil Maria Cunha, Pontificia Universidade Católica do PR, Brazil This chapter deals with the adoption of mobile technology. The case illustrated here is the implementation of mobile and wireless technology – MIT and smartphones – at an energy utility. The objective was to understand the human and social aspects of the adoption of this technology. This paper makes use of the metaphor of hospitality proposed by Ciborra in the late 1990s. The hospitality metaphor was a useful alternative for describing the process of adopting a new technology. It touches on technical aspects and notes human reactions that become evident when a technician comes across an unknown ‘guest’, the new technology: the doubtful character of the guest, the reinterpretation of the identities of guest and host during the process, learning through trial and error, the technology’s ‘drift’, the participants’ emotions and state of mind, and the appropriation of, and the care for, the new technology. Chapter 67 Infrastructures for Development of Context-Aware Mobile Applications......................................... 1104 Hugo Feitosa de Figueirêdo, University of Campina Grande, Brazil Tiago Eduardo da Silva, University of Campina Grande, Brazil Anselmo Cardoso de Paiva, University of Maranhão, Brazil José Eustáquio Rangel de Queiroz, University of Campina Grande, Brazil Cláudio De Souza Baptista, University of Campina Grande, Brazil Context-aware mobile applications are becoming popular, as a consequence of the technological advances in mobile devices, sensors and wireless networking. Nevertheless, developing a context-aware system involves several challenges. For example, what will be the contextual information, how to represent, acquire and process this information and how it will be used by the system. Some frameworks and middleware have been proposed in the literature to help programmers to overcome these challenges. Most of the proposed solutions, however, neither have an extensible ontology-based context model nor uses a communication method that allows a better use of the potentialities of the models of this kind. Chapter 68 A Practice Perspective on Transforming Mobile Work..................................................................... 1119 Riikka Vuokko, Åbo Akademi University, Finland Chapter 68 introduces a study that explores users’ experiences during an organizational implementation of a new mobile information technology in public home care environment. The home care case illus-
trates differences between implementation project goals and expectations, and on the other hand, the daily organizing and carrying out care work, where previously, no information technology was utilized. While implementing mobile technology was expected to enhance the efficiency of care working, the project outcomes include resistance due to surveillance aspect of the new technology as well as technological problems during the implementation. Successful outcomes of the implementation include better planning of working hours and more even distribution of work resources. Chapter 69 Data Replication Support for Collaboration in Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing Environments.......... 1132 João Barreto, INESC-ID/Technical University Lisbon, Portugal Paulo Ferreira, INESC-ID/Technical University Lisbon, Portugal In Chapter 69, the authors address techniques to improve the productivity of collaborative users by supporting highly available data sharing in poorly connected environments such as ubiquitous and mobile computing environments. Authors focus on optimistic replication, a well known technique to attain such a goal. However, the poor connectivity of such environments and the resource limitations of the equipments used are crucial obstacles to useful and effective optimistic replication. The authors analyze state-of-the art solutions, discussing their strengths and weaknesses along three main effectiveness dimensions: (i) faster strong consistency, (ii) with less aborted work, while (iii) minimizing both the amount of data exchanged between and stored at replicas; and identify open research issues Chapter 70 Providing Outdoor and Indoor Ubiquity with WLANs..................................................................... 1155 Diana Bri, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Hugo Coll, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Sandra Sendra, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Jaime Lloret, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Wireless Local Area Networks are very useful for the most applications based on network. It can be developed in almost all environments and products are cheap and robust. Moreover, these networks can be formed by different devices with wireless interfaces like IP cameras, laptops, PDAs, sensors, etc. WLANs provide high bandwidth at large coverage areas, which it is necessary in many applications at different research areas. All these characteristics let WLANs be a useful technology to provide ubiquity for any type of service. If they are deployed from a good and exhaustive design, they can provide connection to any device, everywhere at anytime. In this paper we present a complete guideline about how to design and deploy WLANs and to get their best performance. Authors start from an analytical point of view and use mathematical expressions to design WLANs in both indoor and outdoor environments. Then, the authors introduce a method proposed by some authors of this chapter some years ago and how it can be used to design WLANs in indoor environments. The chapter also presents WLANs design in outdoor environments and describe two projects developed in order to provide ubiquity in real indoor and outdoor environments.
Chapter 71 INTIC for Mobile Devices: Support System for Communication with Mobile Devices for the Disabled.................................................................................................................................. 1169 Cristina Diaz Busch, University of A Coruna, Spain Alberto Moreiras Lorenzo, University of A Coruna, Spain Iván Mourelos Sánchez, University of A Coruna, Spain Betania Groba González, University of A Coruna, Spain Thais Pousada García, University of A Coruna, Spain Laura Nieto Riveiro, University of A Coruna, Spain Javier Pereira Loureiro, University of A Coruna, Spain The In-TIC system for mobile devices (in Spanish: Integration with Information and Communication Technologies system for mobile devices) represents an approach towards the area of technical aids for mobile devices. The mobile telephone is a device that makes our lives easier, allowing us to be permanently accessible and in contact, to save relevant information, and also for entertainment purposes. However, people with visual, auditory or motor impairment or the elderly still find these devices difficult to use. They have to overcome a range of difficulties when using mobile telephones: the screens are difficult to read, the buttons are too small to use, and the technical features are too complicated to understand. At present, the main advances in mobile technology have been aimed at improving multimedia-messaging services and reproducing videos and music. This new support system adds accessibility to mobile telephones, making them easier to use for the people who need them the most, people with reduced physical or mental capacities who cannot use a conventional mobile. Chapter 72 New Ways to Buy and Sell: An Information Management Web System for the Commercialization of Agricultural Products from Family Farms without Intermediaries................ 1182 Carlos Ferrás, University of Santiago Compostela, Spain Yolanda García, University of Santiago Compostela, Spain Mariña Pose, University of Santiago Compostela, Spain Granxafamiliar.com is a project for developing the Galician rural milieu both socio-economically and culturally in order to appreciate the quality of life and rural culture, to create communication links between the rural and urban world, to emphasize the importance of the traditional self-supply production market of Galician family farms, and to promote the spread of new technologies as a social intervention tool against the phenomenon of social and territorial exclusion known as the “Digital Divide”. The authors are planning the architecture of www.granxafamiliar.com, which is developing the creation of a virtual community based on boosting commercial transactions and the possibilities for buying and selling traditional self-supply products that exist in the rural environment. The authors expect to promote it globally across the Internet by promoting the use and spread of ICTs as tools and commercial channels for agricultural products and intend to carry out an in-depth empirical and theoretical study of the territorial and social effects linked to the development of the information and communication society in rural communities. Their aim is to assist the progress of public decision-making and administrative efficiency for when the time comes to invest in suitable services and activities related to the information society in the rural environment.
Chapter 73 Broadcast Quality Video Contribution in Mobility........................................................................... 1199 José Ramón Cerquides Bueno, University of Seville, Spain Antonio Foncubierta Rodriguez, University of Seville, Spain The continuous growth of the available throughput, especially in the uplink of mobile phone networks is opening the doors to new services and business opportunities without references in the past. In more concrete, new standards HSDPA/HSUPA, introduced to complement and enhance 3G networks, together with the advances in audio and especially video coding, like those adopted by the standard H.264 AVC have boosted the appearance of a new service: exploiting the mobile telephony networks for contributing broadcast quality videos. This new service is offering just now a low cost, high flexibility alternative that, in a brief period of time, will substitute the current Electronic News Gathering (ENG) Units, giving rise to what is being to be called Wireless Journalism (WENG or WiNG). This chapter discusses both the technologies involved and the business opportunities offered by this sector. Once reviewed the state of the art, different solutions will be compared, some of them recently appeared as commercial solutions, like QuickLink 3.5G Live Encoder or AirNow! and others still in research and development processes. Chapter 74 Mobile Device Selection in Higher Education: iPhone vs. iPod Touch............................................ 1213 C. Brad Crisp, Abilene Christian University, USA Michael Williams, Pepperdine University, USA Mobile devices are rapidly becoming the most common interface for accessing network resources (Hall 2008). By 2015 the average 18-year old will spend the majority of their computing time on mobile devices (Basso 2009). These trends directly affect institutions of higher learning. Many universities are offering learning initiatives and m-services designed to distribute content and services to mobile devices. Chapter 74 reports findings from an exploratory, longitudinal study at Abilene Christian University, where incoming freshmen received their choice of an Apple iPhone or iPod touch. The findings indicate that users’ device selections were affected by their perceptions of the costs of the devices, the devices’ relative characteristics, and the social influence of parents. We also found that users’ attitude, satisfaction, and confidence about their device selection varied across devices, with iPhone users having more favorable perceptions. The chapter concludes with recommendations for mobile learning initiatives and directions for future research. Chapter 75 Design of Wearable Computing Systems for Future Industrial Environments.................................. 1226 Pierre Kirisci, Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH, Germany Ernesto Morales Kluge, Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH, Germany Emanuel Angelescu, Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH, Germany Klaus-Dieter Thoben, Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH, Germany This chapter investigates the role of context, particularly in future industrial environments, and elaborates how context can be incorporated in a design method in order to support the design process of
wearable computing systems. The chapter is initiated by an overview of basic research in the area of context-aware mobile computing. The aim is to identify the main context elements which have an impact upon the technical properties of a wearable computing system. Therefore the authors describe a systematic and quantitative study of the advantages of context recognition, specifically task tracking, for a wearable maintenance assistance system. Based upon the experiences from this study, a context reference model is proposed, which can be considered supportive for the design of wearable computing systems in industrial settings, thus goes beyond existing context models, e.g. for context-aware mobile computing. The final part of this chapter discusses the benefits of applying model-based approaches during the early design stages of wearable computing systems. Existing design methods in the area of wearable computing are critically examined and their shortcomings highlighted. Based upon the context reference model, a design approach is proposed through the realization of a model-driven software tool which supports the design process of a wearable computing system while taking advantage of concise experience manifested in a well-defined context model. Chapter 76 Extending the Scope of eID Technology: Threats and Opportunities in a Commercial Setting........ 1246 Vincent Naessens, Katholieke Hogeschool Sint-Lieven, Belgium Bart De Decker, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium In 2002, Belgium has adopted an electronic identity card as one of the first countries in Europe. By the end of 2009, the roll-out of the eID card will be completed, and this means that each Belgian citizen will possess an eID card. The card enables her to digitally prove her identity and to legally sign electronic documents. The Belgian eID card opens up new opportunities for the government, its citizens, service providers and application developers. The Belgian eID technology originally aimed at facilitating transactions between Belgian citizens and the government and although many eID applications have been developed, the success of the Belgian eID technology has not been what was expected. Therefore, the Belgian government encourages developers to build commercial applications that use the eID card (for authentication or e-signatures). However, extending the scope of the Belgian eID technology from egovernment to the commercial sector is no sinecure and not without risks. Chapter 77 Mobility and Connectivity: On the Character of Mobile Information Work..................................... 1262 Victor Gonzalez, University of Manchester, UK Antonis Demetriou, University of Manchester, UK Mobile information work, an extreme type of information work, is progressively becoming commonplace in various corporations. The availability of cheap and portable information technologies as well as the development of pervasive communication infrastructure in some parts of the world is creating scenarios where people can work from almost anyplace. Nevertheless up to now there has not been sufficient research on the particular work practices and strategies these professional workers use to be productive as they face the particular challenges of being mobile. Based on an ethnographic investigation of the experiences of mobile professional workers in a multi-national accountancy company, this chapter discusses some characteristics defining the character of modern information work with regards
mobility and connectivity while operating outside the workplace. The study highlights the importance of: location in terms of providing an adequate atmosphere and infrastructure to conduct work; regularity in terms of giving workers flexibility to connect and reconnect whenever it was more convenient for them; space in terms of letting people preserve and reconstruct their information workspaces; and balance while juggling between personal and work related commitments. The findings presented can be useful for defining the processes and technological tools supporting mobile professional workers.
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Foreword
Mobility has become the next big challenge in our inter-connected world. Indeed, after the Internet widespread dissemination, users are eager for information anytime anywhere. Although ubiquity brought the power of computing anywhere, it is the access to global information that enriches the usefulness of mobile computing. From an historical perspective, the Internet widespread dissemination enabled the access to huge amounts of free information. This information is accessible from any pc, provided it is connected to a network. Naturally, the users that were previously restricted to a desktop pc now aspire to have the same access to information from everywhere. Acessing information anytime, everywhere requires a mobile computing environment. To the development of a mobile computing environment contributed the miniaturization of devices and the improvement on wireless technologies. From the miniaturization of devices spurred Smartphones, devices that merge the mobile phone with the pocket pc concepts, and Netbooks, small laptops that favor (wireless) communications to raw computing power. On the other hand, the development of carrier technologies with increased network bandwidth popularized broadband access either at home (through cable) or on mobile devices (through wireless). We now live in a highly inter-connected world, made of several networks, available from a multitude of wireless technologies that enable a mobile behavior (consider for example WiFi, WiMAX, UMTS, HSDPA).
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES AVAILABLE However, (hardware) technology by itself does not suffice to harness the challenges present on a mobile computing environment. It is necessary to consider how technology should be used by applications. The applications for the mobile environment share the same communication model but also the same limitations found in Internet applications. There is an overwhelming range of distributed applications available for distributed systems in general, and for the Internet in particular, that can be brought to the mobile environment. However, the mobile environment presents some specific challenges that are not common for a generic distributed system like the Internet. Device and service availability is an important property of a mobile system since some devices may come and go from the system, rather than being permanently available like the typical server device. A consequence of the absence of permanent availability is the absence of data persistency. Where should
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data be stored? After storing data, possibly in more than a single place, synchronization is another important property. Is the data being accessed the most up-to-date? When looking at the Web evolution, it is possible to clearly identify two phases: the first is about accessing information; and the second is about accessing (web) services. Like the Web, the mobile environment is perfectly capable of offering remote services. Joining services with mobility opens up new market opportunities. For example, geographic based advertising is an example of merging information access (through web services) and mobile positioning. Several web-based map providers are starting to offer recommendations based on the location of the user. This can only be possible having a mobile device that can communicate through a wireless network. Nowadays, there are a variety of (mobile) devices and applications that are capable of running mobile services (consider for example a Smartphone with email/internet access and GPS positioning). Yet, little is known of the success of this new technology, and most importantly, how are people adopting it. The success of a mobile platform is not determined exclusively by technology, but also by how people use it to enrich their lives.
CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE BOOK This handbook of research contributes with state-of-the-art research on all three aspects considered previously: technology, applications and social impact on the adoption of these systems. Several technologies are covered in the book, ranging from performance improvements and routing optimizations on (generic) wireless networks; considerations for WiMAX; new designs for sensor networks; and new uses for RFID and Near Field Communication systems. In the application arena, several areas of interest have been covered, namely: health, e-government, advertisement, e-learning, university campus services, vehicular networks, Virtual and Small-Medium Enterprises and mobile grid computing. A particular attention was given to e-learning, with several contributions in providing lessons through mobile devices, supporting and monitoring tools on mobile devices and identifying success factors for mobile learning model, including specific case studies in large organizations. Device localization received several contributions for being an important operational feature for positioning mobile devices. Two wide range of localization schemes were considered: GPS based and local wireless (WiFi) based. Device localization is necessary to enhance a whole range of services, from advertisement to social ones. Vehicular networks are yet another mobile computing platform that has specific characteristics as a wireless ad-hoc network. This type of network raises unique challenges and security issues that were identified and are not present on typical (computer) networks. In the social impact of a mobile computing platform, several domains have been presented, from a specific collaborative learning environment, to the use of mobile devices in higher education institutions to enterprise institutions. Indeed, the adoption of mobile devices is a disruption of the typical stationary computing platform. Youngsters tend to adopt more easily new technologies, in this case mobile devices, than elders. The typical population of education institutions is younger than enterprise institutions, hence the interest of these case studies in different environments. However, the mobile platform is not confined to the educational environment, and hence the interest of considering how mobile applications can be applied to
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new domains like tourism and entertainment. Regardless of the specific domain in use, it is shown the viability of business models for mobile e-commerce. In summary, a handbook of research that demonstrates what can be achieved within this domain would have been welcome in itself. A handbook that besides this purpose gives real insight, and that drives and inspires those that read it to contribute to the ongoing technological improvements and development of successful applications, represents a major contribution to the body of knowledge in mobility and computing.
Nuno Lopes Assistant Professor of Networks and Communication Technologies Polytechnic Institute of Cávado e Ave Portugal Nuno Lopes received his Bachelor (5 year degree) in Systems and Informatics Engineering, in 2002, from University of Minho, Braga, Portugal. During this course, he made an internship at Philips Research, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Later on he received his PhD degree in Computer Science, from University of Minho, Portugal, in 2009. His PhD focused on the building of large-scale indexing systems through the use of structured peer-to-peer networks. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Instituto Politécnico do Cávado e do Ave, Barcelos, Portugal, teaching Network Communications and Operating Systems courses, among others. His research interests include Distributed Systems, Decentralized Algorithms, Peer-to-peer Networks, and Large-scale Information Retrieval.
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Preface
ABOUT THE SUBJECT The advances in mobile and ubiquitous technologies have more than 35 years of research. After all these years the ubiquity vision is becoming a reality, due to the evolution and new features of the hardware and software components. The advent of Web services and the progress on wearable devices, ambient components, user-generated content, mobile communications, and many other gave origin to new applications and services. Recently advances in web services technologies allowed the integration into mobility. With these two components appeared new business models which imply improvements in technical infrastructure that enables the progress of mobile services and applications. These include dynamic and on-demand service, context-aware services, and mobile web services. While driving new business models and new online services, particular techniques must be developed for web service composition, web service-driven system design methodology, creation of web services, and on-demand web services. The technological, social and organizational dimensions of mobile and ubiquitous computing will be supported by new educational paradigm. Two trends converge to make this possible; increasingly powerful cell phones and PDAs, and improved access to wireless broadband. This handbook of research represents a collection of the most recent developments on the technological, organizational and social dimensions of this highly potential technology of mobility and computing, that dictate a paradigm shift in organizations, society and people. It covers the following dimensions: • •
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The technological dimension, addressing emerging technologies such as Wireless data communication networks; Mobile technologies; Standards and reference models; and Security. The organizational, human and social perspectives, comprising: New business models; Collaborative work; Learning and teaching; Social networks; Studies on adoption; Studies of impact; Critical success factors; and level of preparedness of organizations and people. Applications and solutions developed or under development, and research and development results that address a broad range of sectors, from business to government services, from education to e-Health. The chapters included in the handbook,
•
discuss the importance of this technologies and their support to new applications and solutions, namely in sectors of activity such as business, new organizational and ubiquitous models, eCommerce, government, e-Health, e-Learning, etc.;
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• • • • • •
present practical solutions and recent developments; introduce the state-of-the-art technologies; discuss organizational preparedness for new organizational models potentiated by ubiquity and mobility; discuss the impact on society and on people; discuss critical success factors; introduce future generations of communications and networks.
ORGANIZATION OF THE HANDBOOK This handbook is a compilation of 77 contributions to the discussion of the main issues, challenges, opportunities and developments related with mobility and computing, in a very comprehensive way, in order to disseminate current achievements and practical solutions and applications. These 77 chapters are written by a group of near 240 authors that include many internationally renowned and experienced researchers and specialists in the e-Business field and a set of younger authors, showing a promising potential for research and development. Contributions came from the five continents, and are included contributions from academia, research institutions and industry, representing a good and comprehensive representation of the state-of-the-art approaches and developments that address the several dimensions of this fast evolutionary thematic. The “Handbook of Research on Mobility and Computing: Evolving Technologies and Ubiquitous Impacts” is organized in six sections: Section 1: Mobile Technologies Section 2: Emerging Technologies Section 3: Critical Success Factors Section 4: New Business Models Section 5: Security Section 6: Applications, Surveys and Case Studies The first section, Mobile Technologies is composed by 36 chapters that address relevant research and development contributions to the field of mobility and computing, summarized below. Chapter one, Evaluating the Context Aware Browser: A Benchmark for Proactive, Mobile, and Contextual Web Search, discusses the evaluation of highly interactive and novel context-aware system with a methodology based on a TREC-like benchmark. The authors take as a case study an application for Web content perusal by means of context-aware mobile devices, named Context-Aware Browser. In this application, starting from the representation of the user's current context, queries are automatically constructed and used to retrieve the most relevant Web contents. Since several alternatives for query construction exist, it is important to compare their effectiveness, and to this aim we developed a TREClike benchmark. The authors present their approach to an early stage evaluation, describing their aims and the techniques applied, underlining for, for the evaluation of context-aware retrieval systems, the benchmark methodology adopted could be an extensible and reliable tool. Routing is the process of finding a path from a source node to a destination node. Proposed routing schemes can be divided into topological and position based, depending on the availability of geographic
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location for nodes. Topological routing may be proactive or reactive, while position based routing consists of greedy approaches applied when a neighbor closer to the destination (than the node currently holding the packet) exists, and recovery schemes otherwise. In order to preserve bandwidth and power which are critical resources in ad hoc and sensor networks, localized approaches are proposed, where each node acts based solely on the location of itself, its neighbors, and the destination. There are various measures of optimality which lead to various schemes which optimize hop count, power, network lifetime, delay, or other metrics. This second chapter, Routing in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks, describes a uniform solution based on ratio of cost and progress. Mobile communication networks have become an integral part of our society, significantly enhancing communication capabilities. Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) extend this capability to any time/ anywhere communication, providing connectivity without the need of an underlying infrastructure. Chapter three, Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: Protocol Design and Implementation investigates the new coming realm of mobile ad hoc networks, focusing on research problems related to the design and development of routing protocols, both from a formal and technical point of view. Then the link stability in a high mobility environment is examined, and a route discovery mechanism is analyzed, together with a practical implementation of a routing protocol in ad hoc multi-rate environments which privileges link stability instead of traditional speed and minimum distance approaches. The convergence of wireless applications presents a greater hope for consolidating e-Government applications even in resource-constrained countries such as those in Africa. Chapter four, Convergence of Wireless Technologies in Consolidating E-Government Applications in Sub-Saharan Africa, presents an exploratory study that aims at discussing the extent as to how convergence of wireless technologies from different vendors promises to contribute to the consolidation of e-Government applications in SubSaharan-Africa (SSA). This is done by reviewing the different adoption stages of ICT and e-Government in SSA. It looks at challenges facing adoption of wireless technologies (GSMs, Wireless Internet Access, satellite transmission, etc.) across all the socio-economic value chains in SSA. The chapter looks at Botswana and South Africa as case studies by bringing out the different interventions that have been done in the realm of facilitating a conducive environment for the convergence of different wireless technologies. Out of the analysis of legal, regulatory, market and spectrum policies affecting the adoption of wireless communications in SSAs, the chapter draws out recommendations on how to consolidate wireless communications to be adopted in different socio-economic setups (e.g. e-government, e-Health, e-Banking, etc.). The fifth chapter, Process Innovation with Ambient Intelligence (AmI) Technologies: A Comparison of Australian and German Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Manufacturers, considers the potential for absorptive capacity limitations to prevent SME manufacturers benefiting from the implementation of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) technologies. The chapter also examines the role of intermediary organisations in alleviating these absorptive capacity constraints. In order to understand the context of the research, a review of the role of SMEs in the Australian manufacturing industry, plus the impacts of government innovation policy and absorptive capacity constraints in SMEs in Australia is provided. Advances in the development of ICT industry standards, and the proliferation of software and support for the Windows/ Intel platform have brought technology to SMEs without the need for bespoke development. The results from the joint European and Australian AmI-4-SME projects suggest that SMEs can successfully use "external research sub-units" in the form of industry networks, research organisations and technology providers to offset internal absorptive capacity limitations.
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Chapter six, Providing Ubiquitous Access to Synthetic Sign Language Contents Over Multiple Platforms, presents the design of distributed sign language synthesis architecture. The main objective of this design is to adapt the synthesis process to the diversity of user devices. The synthesis process has been divided into several independent modules that can be run either in a dedicated server or in the client device. Depending on the modules assigned to the server or to the client, four different scenarios have been defined. These scenarios may vary from a heavy client design which executes the whole synthesis process, to a light client design similar to a video player. These four scenarios will provide equivalent signed message quality independently of the device’s hardware and software resources. Chapter seven, The Impact of MIMO Communication on Non-Frequency Selective Channels Performance, reviews the basic concepts of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems and analyses their performance within non-frequency selective channels. The MIMO system model is established and by applying the singular value decomposition (SVD) to the channel matrix, the whole MIMO system can be transformed into multiple single-input single-output (SISO) channels having unequal gains. In order to analyze the system performance, the quality criteria needed to calculate the error probability of M-ary QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) are briefly reviewed and used as reference to measure the improvements when applying different signal processing techniques. Bit and power allocation is a well-known technique that allows improvement in the bit-error rate (BER) by managing appropriately the different properties of the multiple SISO channels. It can be used to balance the BER’s in the multiple SISO channels when minimizing the overall BER. In order to compare the various results, the efficiency of fixed transmission modes is studied in this work regardless of the channel quality. It is demonstrated that only an appropriate number of MIMO layers should be activated when minimizing the overall BER under the constraints of a given fixed date rate. Chapter eight, Node Localization in Ad-hoc Networks, introduces node localization techniques in adhoc networks including received signal strength (RSS), time-of-arrival (TOA) and direction-of-arrival (DOA). Wireless channels in ad-hoc networks can be categorized as LOS and NLOS. In LOS channels, the majority of localization techniques perform properly. However, in NLOS channels, the performance of these techniques reduces. Therefore, non-line-of-sight (NLOS) identification and mitigation techniques, and localization techniques for NLOS scenarios are briefly reviewed. The technological revolution that has created a vast health problem due to a drastic change in lifestyle also holds great potential for individuals to take better care of their own health. This is the focus of the presented overview of current applications, and prospects for future research and innovations, addressed by chapter nine, Wireless and Mobile Technologies Improving Diabetes Self-Management. The presented overview and the main goals of the systems included are to utilize ICT as aids in self-management of individual health challenges, for the disease Diabetes, both for Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. People with diabetes are generally as mobile as the rest of the population, and should have access to mobile technologies for managing their disease. Forty-seven relevant studies and prototypes of mobile, diabetesspecific self-management tools meeting our inclusion criteria have been identified; 27 publicly available products and services, nine relevant patent applications, and 31 examples of other disease-related mobile self-management systems are included to provide a broader overview of the state of the art. Finally, the reviewed systems are compared, and future research directions are suggested. Chapter ten, Adaptive Multicarrier Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum Combined with Channel Coding, presents an adaptive Multicarrier Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (MCFH-SS) system employing proposed Quasi Cyclic Low Density Parity Check (QC-LDPC) codes instead of the conventional LDPC codes. A new technique for constructing the QC-LDPC codes based on row division method
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is proposed. The new codes offer more flexibility in terms of girth, code rates and codeword length. Moreover, a new scheme for channel prediction in MCFH-SS system is also proposed. The technique adaptively estimates the channel conditions and eliminates the need for the system to transmit a request message prior to transmitting the packet data. The proposed adaptive MCFH-SS system uses PN sequences to spread out frequency spectrum, reduce the power spectral density and minimize the jammer effects. Although B2B e-commerce provides healthcare organizations a wealth of new opportunities and ways of doing business, it also presents them with a series of challenges. B2B e-commerce adoption remain poorly understood and it is also a relatively under-researched area. Therefore, case studies were conducted to investigate the challenges and issues in adopting and utilizing B2B e-commerce systems in the healthcare sector. The major aims of the study presented in chapter eleven, Key Adoption Challenges and Issues of B2B E-Commerce in the Healthcare Sector are to: (a) identify and examine main B2B e-commerce adoption challenges and issues for healthcare organizations; and (b) develop a B2B e-commerce adoption challenges and issues table to assist healthcare organizations in identifying and managing them. Chapter twelve, A Pervasive Polling Secret-Sharing Based Access Control Protocol for Sensitive Information, presents a novel access control mechanism for sensitive information which requires permission from different entities or persons to be accessed. The mechanism consists of a file structure and a protocol which extend the features of the OpenPGP Message Format standard by using secret sharing techniques. Several authors are allowed to work in the same file, while access is blocked for not authorized users. Access control rules can be set indicating the minimum number of authors that need to be gathered together in order to open the file. Furthermore, these rules can be different for each section of the document, allowing collaborative work. Non-repudiation and authentication are achieved by means of a shared signature. The scheme’s features are best appreciated when using it in a mobile scenario. Deployment in such an environment is easy and straight. Mobile devices, including cell phones, capable of geo-positioning (or localization) are paving the way for new computer assisted systems called mobile location-based recommenders (MLBRs). MLBRs are systems that combine information on user’s location with information about user’s interests and requests to provide recommendations that are based on “location”. MLBR applications are numerous and emerging. One MLBR application is in advertisement where stores announce their coupons and users try to find the coupons of their interests nearby their locations through their cell phones. Chapter thirteen, Mobile Location-Based Recommenders: An Advertisement Case Study discusses the concept and characteristics of MLBRs and presents the architecture and components of a MLBR for advertisement. Mobile devices have become a new platform with many possibilities to develop studies and implement projects. The power and current capabilities of these devices besides its market penetration makes applications and services in the area of mobility particularly interesting. Mobile terminals have become small computers, they have an operating system, storage capacity so it is possible to develop applications that run on them. Today these applications are highly valued by users. Nowadays we want not only to talk or send messages by mobile terminal, but also to play games, to buy cinema tickets, to read email… We can bring these capabilities in our pocket. The University may not be aware of this fact. The students, due to their age, are the main users and purchasers. In this sense, chapter 14, Services for Mobile Devices in a Universitary Scenario, presents three applications developed for mobile devices, that are being used in Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca. All of them work on a university scenario and use different kind of services.
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Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have experienced an amazing evolution during the last decade. Compared with other wired or wireless networks, wireless sensor networks extend the range of data collection and make it possible for us to get information from every corner of the world. The chapter begins with an introduction to WSNs and their applications. Chapter 15, Event Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks recognizes event detection as a key component for WSN applications. The chapter provides a structured and comprehensive overview of various techniques used for event detection in WSNs. Existing event detection techniques have been grouped into threshold based and pattern based mechanisms. For each category of event detection mechanism, the chapter surveys some representative technical schemes. The chapter also provides some analyses on the relative strengths and weaknesses of these technical schemes. Towards the end, the trends in the research regarding the event detection in WSNs are described. At the beginning of the 21st century in a world dominated by technology it is essential to enhance and update the school, creating conditions for the students to succeed, consolidating the role of ICT as a key resource for learning and teaching in this new era. In Chapter 16, M-English – Podcast: A Tool for Mobile Devices, the authors describe a study that was carried out in a Portuguese school. As a means to overcome some of the existing logistical obstacles in the school, where the possibility of carrying out ICT activities without restrictions was still dreamlike, the podcast was implemented as an m-learning tool. Being aware of the fact that nowadays mobile phones and mp3 players are part of our students’ lives, the authors took advantage of this fact and the podcast was used as a tool to support, to enhance and to motivate students to learn English, used thus as a complement to traditional (face-to-face) learning. Disaster can be defined as the onset of an extreme event causing profound damage or loss as perceived by the afflicted people. The networks built in order to detect and handle these events are called Public safety networks (PSNs). These networks have the fundamental role of providing communication and coordination for emergency operations. Many of the problems of the PSN field come from the heterogeneity of systems and agencies involved in the crisis site and from their mobility at the disaster site. The main aim of Chapter 17, Public Safety Networks, is to provide a broad view of the PSN field, presenting the different emergency management phases, PSNs requirements, technologies and some of the future research directions for this field. The purpose of Chapter 18, Mobile Applications as Mobile Learning and Performance Support Tools in Psychotherapy Activitites, is the analysis of mobile applications as performance and informal learning support tools that facilitate the development of the psychotherapy process. The “e-therapy” has become a common term to refer the delivery of mental health services, on-line or related to a computer mediated communication between a psychotherapist and the patient. Initially, a background on e-therapy is provided and after the “self-help therapy”–a kind of e-therapy where the concept of patient empowerment is important– is exposed. Then, the integration of mobile devices in the psychotherapy process will be explained considering how their technological features support patient therapeutic activities like behavior assessment and informal mobile learning. The relation of the mobile devices with psychotherapist work activities such as evidence gathering and patient monitoring will also be explained. The chapter includes a discussion on the mobile learning practices as a source of potential strategies that can be applied in the therapeutic field and finally a set of recommendations and future directions are described to explore new lines of research. Location-based services (LBSs) are impacting different aspects of human’s life. To date, different LBSs have been emerged, each supporting a specific application or service. While some LBSs have aimed at addressing the needs of general populations, such as navigation systems, others have been focused
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on addressing the needs of specific populations, including kids, youths, elderly, and people with special needs. In recent years, interest in taking a LBS approach in education and learning has grown. The main purpose of such educational LBSs is facilitating a means for learners to be more efficient and effective in their learning activities using their location as the underlying information in decision making. In CampusLocator: A Mobile Location-Based Service for Learning Resources the authors present a novel LBS, called CampusLocator, whose main goal is to assist students in locating and accessing learning resources including libraries, seminars, and tutorials that are available on a campus. WiMAX is being promoted as a potential solution to a number of problems that have plagued the wired and wireless broadband industry since it originated. Can WiMAX fulfill this promise in a crowded and competitive market? If so, what factors are critical to its success? Who will use WiMAX and for what purposes? This chapter, The Future of WiMAX, identifies both the critical success factors that will give WiMAX an edge over other existing wireless technologies and the key applications that will contribute to its success. The top three critical success factors for WiMAX are availability of handset devices and consumer premise equipment, bandwidth speed, and interoperability and standardization. A panel of WiMAX experts concludes that broadband on demand, wireless services provider access, and Voice over IP are the top three killer applications for WiMAX. Chapter 21, Determinants of Loyalty Intention in Portuguese Mobile Market, conceptualizes and highlights the determinants of customers’ loyalty in the Portuguese mobile market. The authors raise questions about the interrelationships of the cost and values dimensions and the consequences of these relationships on customer satisfaction and trust and consequently loyalty among different operators, addressing some recent models. By organizing and synthesizing the major research streams and tests empirically a conceptual framework through a SEM, with data gather in a survey of Portuguese clients, the present study advances knowledge on the nature of the relative importance of different components of loyalty to mobile communications operators. Some useful preliminary insights were produced related to customers’ retention process in primary mobile operator, which appears strongly related to price/ quality, followed by the emotional connection to the operator staff and others clients. Nonetheless, a considerable number of issues were left for future research, including the possibility of extending the investigation to other countries. Current technological advances and the increasing diffusion of its use for scientific, financial and social activities, make Internet the de facto platform for providing worldwide distributed data storage, distributed computing and communication. It creates new opportunities for the development of new kinds of applications, but it will also create several challenges in managing the information distributed on the Internet and in guaranteeing its “on-time” access through the network infrastructures that realize the Internet. Many researchers believed and still believe that the mobile agents could propose several attractive solutions to deal with such challenges and problems. Chapter 22, Mobile Agents: Concepts and Technologies, presents the core concepts of mobile agents, and attempts to provide a clear idea of the possibility of their use by introducing the problems they cope with, the application areas where they provide advantages with respect to other technologies and the available mobile agent technologies. Traditional networks suppose the existence of some path between endpoints, small end to end roundtrip Delay time, and loss ratio. Today, however, new applications, environments and types of devices are challenging these assumptions. In Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), an end-to-end path from source to destination may not exist. Nodes may connect and exchange information in an opportunistic way. Chapter 23, Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks, presents a broad overview of DTNs, particularly focusing on Vehicular DTNs, their main characteristics, challenges, and research projects on this field. In the near
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future, cars are expected to be equipped with devices that will allow them to communicate wirelessly. However, there will be strict restrictions to the duration of their connections with other vehicles, whereas the conditions of their links will greatly vary; DTNs present an attractive solution. Therefore, VDTNs constitute an attractive research field. It has been substantially proven that the use of new technologies can improve a child's learning process. However, the main problem for the teacher continues to be that he/she cannot pay attention to all children at the same time. Sometimes it is necessary to decide which child must be first attended to. It is in this context that we believe our system has the ability to greatly help teachers: we have developed a learning process control system that allows teachers to determine which students have problems, how many times a child has failed, which activities they are working on and other such useful information, in order to decide how to distribute his/her time. Furthermore, bearing in mind the attention required by kindergarten students, Chapter 24, Monitoring the Learning Process through the use of Mobile Devices, proposes the provision of mobile devices (PDA - Personal Digital Assistant) for teachers, permitting free movement in the classroom and allowing the teacher to continue to help children while information about other students is being received. Therefore if a new problem arises the teacher is immediately notified and can act accordingly. Computer technologies, especially ICT have become ubiquitous in people’s lives. Nowadays, mobile phones, PDAs, laptops and a constellation of software tools are more and more used for a variety of activities carried out in both personal and professional lives. Given the features that these technologies provide and are provided with, for example, connectivity and portability, it can be said that ICTs have the potential to support nomadic work practices which are seen as increasingly characteristic of the knowledge economy. Chapter 25, The Making of Nomadic Work: Understanding the Mediational Role of ICTs, presents a review of the concept of nomadic work and, based on a broad literature analysis, discusses the ways in which ICTs may empower people who are involved with nomadic work practices. It aims to give a starting point for those who intend to develop further research on technologically-mediated nomadic work practices in the knowledge economy. Chapter 26, I-GATE: Interperception - Get All The Environments, introduces the I-GATE architecture, a new approach, which includes a set of rules and software architecture, to connect users from different interfaces and devices in the same virtual environment, transparently, even with low capacity of resources. The system detects the user resources and provides transformations on the data in order for its visualization in 3D, 2D and textual-only (1D) interfaces. This allows users from any interface to get a connection in the system using any device and to access and exchange information with other users (including ones with other interface types) in a straightforward way, without need to changing hardware or software. The authors formalize the problem, including modeling, implementation, and usage of the system, also introducing some applications that they have created and implemented in order to evaluate the proposal. Authors have used these applications in cell phones, PDAs, Digital Television, and heterogeneous computers, using the same architecture, with success. The widespread and availability of increasingly powerful mobile devices is contributing for the incorporation of new services and features on our daily communications and social relationships. In this context, geolocation of users and points of interest in mobile devices may contribute, in a natural way, to support either the mediation of remote conversations as the promotion of face-to-face meetings between users, leveraging social networks. The CONNECTOR system is based on geolocation data (people, content and activities), enabling users to create and develop their personal relations with other members of the CONNECTOR social network. Users, maps, sharing features and multimedia content
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are actors in this social network allowing CONNECTOR to address the promotion of geolocated social networks driven by physical proximity and common interests among users. Chapter 27, CONNECTOR: A Geolocated Mobile Social Service, discusses the work undertaken for the conceptualization and development of the CONNECTOR system. Preliminary evaluation results along with usage contexts are also presented. The chapter concludes with a discussion about future developments in geolocation and personalization in mobile communication services. Nowadays, triple-play services are offered in both wireless and wired networks. The network convergence and the new services such as VoIP and IPTV are a reality. However, the future of these networks will have a different concept, the ubiquity. The solutions must be based on the structures and current environments to carry out those challenges in a correct way. In order to reach this ubiquity, the science community has to take into account that its implementation should not assume a high cost to the user and that the system must comply with the quality of service measurements to satisfy the user. Chapter 28, Providing VoIP and IPTV Services in WLANs, introduces the main VoIP and IPTV (IP Television) transmission protocols and the compression formats most used as also the bandwidth needed. The goal is to provide ubiquity into multimedia scenarios in WLANs. Authors will carry out tests to guarantee the appropriate values in some network parameters such jitter, delay, number of lost packets and enough effective bandwidth that should be satisfied. They demonstrate the measurements taken from several test benches. They show the parameter values that the devices should perform in order to stay connected from anywhere at any time to these services. One of the sectors that have a great potential to use and exploit the new communication technologies is the healthcare sector. Nowadays, the application of all these new technologies to support the clinical procedures has taken part in the definition of a new concept known as e-Health. This concept involves a lot of different services related with the medicine/health terms and the information technologies. However, to provide emergency transportation with better care capabilities to the patient is something that still has a lot to improve. Within this context SIe-Health comes into being a software platform oriented for developing Telemedicine solutions. The solution model proposed in Chapter 29 SIe-Health, e-Health Information System, allows remote assistance for a mobile health emergency, integrating in this service electro-medical devices and videoconference services. The popularity of mobile computing creates new opportunities for information sharing and collaboration through technologies like radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and location awareness technologies. Chapter 30, Combining Location Tracking and RFID Tagging toward an Improved Research Infrastructure, discusses how these technologies, which provide subtly different information, can be used together toward increased benefit to users. This work introduces technologies for RFID and location awareness, including a survey of projects. The authors describe advantages of combining these technologies, illustrated through our system, TagIt, that uses these technologies in a traditional research poster environment to provide a rich multimedia experience and encourage ongoing feedback from poster viewers. An overview of TagIt is provided, including user commenting and information sharing capabilities that make use of RFID and location information. User feedback and an expert review highlights how TagIt could benefit authors, information consumers, and the research community, leading to future directions for the research community. The appearance of concepts such as “Ambient Intelligent”, “Ubiquitous Computing” and “ContextAwareness” is causing the development of a new type of services called “Context-Aware Services” that in turn may affect users of mobile communications. This technology revolution is a complex process because of the heterogeneity of contents, devices, objects, technologies, resources and users that can be
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coexist at the same local environment. The novel approach in Chapter 31, Model and Infrastructure for Communications in Context-Aware Services, is the development of a ”Local Infrastructure” in order to provide intelligent, transparent and adaptable services to the user and solves the problem of local context control. Authors present a conceptual model for development of local infrastructure, an architecture design to control the service offered by the local infrastructure. This infrastructure proposed consists of an intelligent device network to link the personal portable device with the contextual services. The device design is modular, flexible, scalable, adaptable and reconfigurable remotely in order to tolerate new demand services whenever is needed. Finally, the result suggests that authors will be able to develop a wide range of new and useful applications, not conceived at origin. The use of mobile devices with possible connection to the Internet is increasing tremendously. This mobility poses new challenges at various levels, including hardware, network services, and the development of applications. The user searches small and lightweight devices, easy to use, and with vast autonomy in terms of energy. She/He seeks also to connect the Internet “every time, everywhere”, possibly using different access technologies. Given the interface limitations, and processing capabilities of small mobile devices, the software and the operating system used must be necessarily adapted. Chapter 32, Network Mobility and Mobile Applications Development, overviews the mobility area, provides deep insight in the field, and presents the main existing problems. Mobility and the development of mobile applications are closed related. The advances in network mobility lead to different approaches in the mobile applications development. The chapter proposes a model for developing mobile applications, based on our research. Wireless sensor networks are composed of geographically dispersed sensors that work together to monitor physical or environmental conditions. In addition, wireless sensor networks are used in many industrial, social, and regulatory applications, including industrial process monitoring and control, environment and habitat monitoring, healthcare, home automation, and traffic control. Developers of wireless sensor networks face a number of programming and deployment challenges. Chapter 33, Building Mobile Sensor Networks Using Smartphones and Web Services: Ramifications and Development Challenges, shows how smartphones can help reduce the development, operation, and maintenance costs of wireless sensor networks, while also enabling these networks to use web services, high-level programming APIs, and increased hardware capability, such as powerful microprocessors. Moreover, this chapter examines key challenges associated with developing and maintaining a large wireless sensor network and presents a novel smartphone wireless sensor network that uses smartphones as sensor nodes. The work is validated in the context of Wreck Watch, which is a smartphone-based sensor network for detecting traffic accidents that authors use to demonstrate solutions to multiple challenges in current wireless sensor networks. The authors also describe common pitfalls of using smartphones as sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks and summarize how have addressed these pitfalls in Wreck Watch. Modern life makes people internet-dependents. They want to move connected and care for always getting the best options for connectivity, hoping between providers. Freedom for choosing providers and the business options which these exchanges can offer are the motivations for Chapter 34, Technologies to improve the quality of handovers: Ontologies, Contexts and Mobility Management. After pointing out some characteristics which make the basics of the current handover technologies, we describe an information infrastructure, based on context and ontologies which can be used to foster an intelligent, efficient and profitable scenario for managing handovers in the Next Generation Networks. Some experiments are described and the potential of using these technologies are evaluated. In smart environments, making a location-aware personal computing working accurately is a way of getting close to the pervasive computing vision. The best candidate to determine a user location in
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indoor environment is by using IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) signals, since it is more and more widely available and installed on most mobile devices used by users. Unfortunately, the signal strength, signals quality and noise of Wi-Fi, in worst scenario, it fluctuates up to 33% because of the reflection, refraction, temperature, humidity, the dynamic environment, etc. Chapter 35, Making Location-Aware Computing Working Accurately in Smart Spaces, presents the current development on a light-weight algorithm, which is easy, simple but robust in producing the determination of user location using WiFi signals. The algorithm is based on "multiple observers" on ηk-Nearest Neighbour. The authors extend the approach in the estimation indoor-user location by using combination of different technologies, i.e. WiFi, GPS, GSM and Accelerometer. The algorithm is based on opportunistic localization algorithm and fuse different sensor data in order to be able to use the data which is available at the user position and processable in a mobile device. Context-aware computing is a class of mobile computing that can sense its physical environment and adapt its behavior accordingly; it is a component of the ubiquitous or pervasive computing environment that has become apparent with innovations and challenges. Chapter 36, User Pro-Activities Based on Context History, reviews the concept of context-aware computing, with focus on the user activities that benefit from context history. How user activities in the smart environment can make use of context histories in applications that apply the concept of context prediction integrated with user pro-activity is explored. A brief summary of areas which benefit from these technologies as well as corresponding issues are also investigated. The ten chapters of Section 2, Emerging Technologies, introduce emerging technologies able to dictate a complete shift of applications and services towards ubiquity. Advances in wireless, sensor, mobile and wearable technologies present new challenges for data mining research on providing mobile applications with intelligence. Autonomy and adaptability requirements are the two most important challenges for data mining in this new environment. In Chapter 37, Research Challenge of Locally Computed Ubiquitous Data Mining, the authors analyse the challenges of designing ubiquitous data mining services by examining the issues and problems while paying special attention to context and resource awareness. The authors focused on the autonomous execution of a data mining algorithm and analyzed the situational factors that influence the quality of the result. Already existing solutions in this area and future directions of research are also covered. Chapter 38, Emerging Wireless Networks for Social Applications, describes the implementation and performance evaluation of a novel routing protocol called Pandora, designed for social applications, and that can be implemented in a broad number of devices, such as commercial wireless routers and laptops. It also provides a robust backbone integrating and sharing data, voice and video between computers and mobile devices. Pandora offers great performance with both fixed and mobile devices and includes important features such as: geographic positioning, residual battery energy monitoring, and bandwidth utilization. In addition, Pandora also considers the number of devices attached to the network. Pandora is experimentally evaluated in a testbed with laptops for the first stage and commercial wireless routers for the second stage. The main goal of Pandora is to provide a reliable backbone for social applications requiring a quality of service (QoS) guarantee. With this in mind, the following evaluation of Pandora considers the following types of traffic sources: transport control protocol (TCP), voice, video and user datagram protocol (UDP) without marks. Pandora is also compared with different queuing disciplines, including: priority queuing discipline (PRIO), hierarchical token bucket (HTB) and DSMARK. Finally, an Internet radio transmission is employed to test the network re-configurability. Results show that queuing the PRIO and HTB disciplines, which prioritizes UDP traffic, performed the best.
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Several complex and time-critical applications require the existence of novel distributed, heterogeneous and dynamic platforms composed of a variety of fixed and mobile processing nodes and networks. Such platforms, that can be called Pervasive Mobile Grids, aim to merge the features of Pervasive Computing and High-performance Grid Computing onto a new emerging paradigm. In this chapter we study a methodology for the design and the development of high-performance, adaptive and context-aware applications. Chapter 39, “An Approach to Mobile Grid Platforms for the Development and Support of Complex Ubiquitous Applications”, describes a programming model approach, and the authors compare it with other existing research works in the field of Pervasive Mobile Computing, discussing the rationales of the requirements and the features of a novel programming model for the target platforms and applications. In order to exemplify the proposed methodology, the authors introduce the programming framework ASSISTANT, and provide some interesting future directions in this research field. Potentially, in the mobile computing scenario, the users can move in different environments and the applications can automatically explore their surroundings. This kind of context-aware application is emerging, but is not yet widely disseminated. Based on perceived context, the application can modify its behavior. This process, in which software modifies itself according to sensed data, is named Adaptation and constitutes the core of Ubiquitous Computing. The ubiquitous computing scenario brings many new problems such as coping with the limited processing power of mobile devices, frequent disconnections, the migration of code and tasks between heterogeneous devices, and others. Current practical approaches to the ubiquitous computing problem usually rely upon traditional computing paradigms conceived back when distributed applications where not a concern. Holoparadigm (Holo) was proposed as a model to support the development of distributed systems. Based on Holo concepts, a new programming language called HoloLanguage (HoloL) was created. Chapter 40, Towards a Programming Model for Ubiquitous Computing, propose the use of Holo for developing and executing ubiquitous applications, explore the HoloL for ubiquitous programming and propose a full platform to develop and execute Holo programs. The execution environment is based on a virtual machine that implements the concepts proposed by Holo. The Virtual Enterprise (VE) is a collaboration model between multiple business partners in a value chain that aims to cope with turbulent business environments, mainly characterized by demand unpredictability, shortening product lifecycles, and intense cost pressures. The VE model is particularly viable and applicable for SME and industry parks containing multiple SMEs that have different vertical competencies. As small firms collaborate effectively under VE model, it will be only possible to emerge products by joining their diverse competencies and mitigate the effects of market turbulence by minimizing their investment. A typical VE model has four phases; opportunity capture, formation, operation, and dissolution. The goal of Chapter 41, An Agent-Based Operational Virtual Enterprise Framework Enabled by RFID, is to present a conceptual VE framework, focusing on operation phase, that incorporates Multi Agent Systems (MAS) and Radio Frequency Identification Systems (RFID) which are emerging from research to industry with a great momentum. First, state of the art for VE and the two key enabling technologies are covered in detail. After presenting conceptual view of the framework, an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) view is also given to enhance technical integration with available industry standards and solutions. Finally, process views of how a VE can operate utilizing agent based and RFID systems in order to fulfill operational requirements, are presented. Chapter 42, Ontological Dimensions of Semantic Mobile Web 2.0. First Principles, advances, from the point of view of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, an analysis of which ontological dimensions are needed to develop Mobile Web 2.0 on top of Semantic Web. This analysis will be particularly focused on social networks and it will try to make an outlook about the new knowledge challenges on
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this field. Some of these new challenges will be linked to Semantic Web context, while others will be inherent to Semantic Mobile Web 2.0. Unobtrusiveness is a key factor in usability of mobile and ubiquitous computing systems. These systems are made of several ambient and mobile devices whose goal is supporting everyday life users’ activities, hopefully without interfering with them. We intend to address the topic of obtrusiveness by assessing its impact in the design of interfaces for mobile and ubiquitous computing systems. The authors of Chapter 43, Unobtrusive Interaction with Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems, will make the case of how unobtrusive interfaces can be designed by means of Kinetic User Interfaces: an emerging interaction paradigm where input to system is provided through coordinated motion of objects and people in the physical space. A huge amount of information is used nowadays by modern vehicles, and it may be accessed through an On Board Diagnosis (OBD) connection. A technique using the already installed OBD system to communicate with the vehicle together with a Global Position System (GPS) provides reliable data which allow a detailed analysis of real on road tests. Different kinds of circulation circuits (urban, extra-urban and highway) were analyzed in Chapter 44, Impact of Advances on Computing and Communication Systems in Automotive Testing, using the capabilities of OBD II installed on the tested vehicles. OBD provides an important set of information, namely related with data on the engine, fuel consumption, chassis and auxiliary systems and also on combustion efficiency. The use of GPS in all the road tests performed provides important information to further determine the more sustainable from all the different solutions tested, considering the different situations imposed on each circuit. It is a fact that bench tests or a chassis dynamometer allow a fine control of the operation conditions; however the simulation is not as real as on the road. So the present methodology will allow the possibility to perform tests on the road, allowing enough control on vehicles and providing complete information of the chosen route and of the trip history. This is a possibility that ensures new tools with more reliable data which can give faster answers for the development of high efficiency, economic and environmentally neutral automotive technologies. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology consists of a tag that can be used to identify an animal, a person or a product, and a device responsible for transmitting, receiving and decoding the radio waves. RFID tags work in two different modes: they wake up when they receive a radio wave signal and reflect it (Passive Mode) or they emit their own signal (Active Mode). The tags store information which allows univocally identifying something or someone. That information is stored in an IC (Integrated Circuit) which is connected to an antenna, responsible for transmitting the information. An evolution of this technology is the Near Field Communication (NFC). It consists of a contactless Smart Card technology, based in short-range RFID. Currently, there are mobile phones with NFC embedded in such a way that they work both as a tag and as a NFC reader. These technologies will be widely available both in mobile phones and other devices (e.g. personal digital assistants, etc.) in the near future allowing us to get closer to a ubiquitous and pervasive world. Chapter 45, RFID and NFC in the Future of Mobile Computing describe the most important aspects of RFID and NFC technology, illustrating their applicative potential, and provides a vision of the future in which the virtual and real worlds merge together as if an osmosis took place. Chapter 46, A Multi-Loop Development Process for a Wearable Computing System in Autonomous Logistics, examines a multi-loop development process for a wearable computing system within a new paradigm in logistic applications. The implementation of this system will be demonstrated by an example from the field of autonomous logistics for automobile logistics. The development process is depicted from
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selecting and combining hardware through to the adjustment to both user and operative environment. Further, this chapter discusses critical success factors like robustness and flexibility. The objective is to present problems and challenges as well as a possible approach to cope with them. The next chapters, that form Section 3 Critical Success Factors, address the critical success factors affecting the full exploitation of the potential of the services and applications of mobility and computing. A proper development of computing which penetrate our society more thoroughly with the availability of broadband services is provided by varied cooperative networks. However, the success of social dimension of computing requires collaboration within a multicultural environment to be considered. Aim of Chapter 47, Collaboration within Social Dimension of Computing: Theoretical Background, Empirical Findings and Practical Development, is to analyze collaboration within the social dimension of computing on the pedagogical discourse. The meaning of the key concepts of social dimension of computing, collaboration and its factors is studied within the search for the success of social dimension. The manuscript introduces the study conducted within the Baltic Summer School Technical Informatics and Information Technology in 2009. The conducted explorative research comprises four stages: exploration of the contexts of collaboration, analysis of the students’ needs (content analysis), data processing, analysis and data interpretation, and analysis of the results and elaboration of conclusions and hypothesis for further studies. Many factors converge when attempting to define the most adequate mobile learning model to be applied in a face-to-face university environment. As far as innovation related processes go, the implementation of mobile learning, implies defining a road map on the basis of strategic planning. It is also important to apply an action research approach in the implementation process of the model. In analyzing in depth this innovative mobile learning process, there are key factors to consider. First, there are factors related to the technology necessary for the implementation of the model—both hard and soft requirements. Second, there are cultural issues related to the use of non-native internet professors of innovative technologies. Finally, there are challenges related to defining, exactly, those educational strategies to be handled through mobile devices. Chapter 48, Critical Factors In Defining The Mobile Learning Model. An Innovative Process For Hybrid Learning At The Tecnologico De Monterrey, A Mexican University, focuses on the critical factors involved in integrating mobile learning into a hybrid educational model at a Mexican university. The purpose of Chapter 49, Critical Human Factors on Mobile Applications for Tourism and Entertainment, is to research some principles that can guide the design, development and marketing of mobile applications, with a particular focus on the tourism and entertainment application domains. This research also fills a gap concerning impact studies of mobile applications, since the majority of the literature available today is more focused on the design and development process and results. Besides describing a set of novel mobile applications, we aim at providing an overview on innovation processed used, and conducting several experiences, gathering results from questionnaires, surveys, log data and our own observations. Regarding the mobile tourism domain, the author studied the impact of media visibility, the impact of novel interaction paradigms. Regarding the mobile entertainment applications, he focused on studying the impact brought that realism and graphics quality have on mobile games. Internet surveys offer important advantages over traditional survey methods: they can accomplish large samples within a relatively short period of time, questionnaires may have visual and navigational functionalities impossible to implement in paper-and-pencil questionnaires, data is more efficiently processed since it already comes in electronic format and costs can be lower. But the use of the Internet for survey purposes raises important concerns related to population coverage, lack of suitable sampling
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frames and non-response. Despite its problems, Internet-based surveys are growing and will continue to expand presenting researchers with the challenge of finding the best way to adapt the methods and principles established in survey methodology to this new mode of data collection in order to make best use of it. Chapter 50, Internet Surveys: Opportunities and Challenges, describes the positive features of the Internet for survey activity and examines some of the challenges of conducting surveys via the Internet by looking at methodological issues such as coverage, sample selection, non-response and data quality. The purpose of Chapter 51, EPS A Coalition-Based Production Approach, is to provide broad view of the rationale, fundamental principles, current developments and applications for Evolvable Production Systems (EPS). Special attention is given to how complexity is handled, the use of agent based and wireless technology, and how economical issues are affected by having an evolvable system. The rationale for EPS is based on current road mapping efforts, which have clearly underlined that true industrial sustainability requires far higher levels of system autonomy and adaptivity than what can be achieved within current production system paradigms. Since its inception in 2002 as a next generation of production systems, the EPS concept has been further developed and tested to emerge as a production system paradigm with technological solutions and mechanisms that support sustainability. Technically, EPS is based on the idea of using several re-configurable, process-oriented, agent-based and wireless intelligent modules of low granularity. This allows for a continuous adaption and evolution of the production system and the ability to explore emergent behavior of the system, which are imperative to remain fit with regards to the system environment. The proposal of new business models, based on the emerging novelty and huge opportunities of mobility and computing is the theme of the next four chapters, which compose Section 4 New Business Models. As mobile applications increase in popularity, the issue of how to build viable business models for the m-commerce industry is becoming a clear priority for both organizations and researchers. In order to address this issue, this chapter, Viable Business Models for M-Commerce: The Key Components, reports on five mini cases used as a guideline, and applies the theoretical business model from Chesbrough and Rosenbloom (2002) to each of them to find out the most important components of viable business models for their m-commerce applications. The study then uses cross cases analysis as a research tool to compare and contrast each of the mini cases and to find out how the different organizations fit within the researched theoretical business model. Finally, this chapter confirms that there are 7 important components of viable business models for m-commerce which are: value proposition, market segment, value chain, profit potential, value network, competitive strategy and firm capabilities. This study also highlights the fact that the public visibility of these 7 components is uneven. Some components such as value proposition, value chain, value network and firm’s capabilities are more likely to be presented in public by organizations. However, aspects such as cost structure and profit potential, market segment and competitive strategy are more likely to be hidden from the public due to their commercial sensitivity. Mobility is a relatively recent topic in the enterprise arena, but thanks to the widespread use of cell phones it has already changed much of the business landscape. It should be integrated in enterprise architectures (EAs) as an intrinsic feature and not as an add-on or as an afterthought transition. Current EA frameworks were not designed with mobility in mind and are usually based on the process paradigm, emphasizing functionality. Although the issue of establishing a systematized migration path from a nonmobile EA to a mobile one has already been tackled, the need for mobile-native EA modeling frameworks is still felt. Chapter 53, A Service-Based Framework to Model Mobile Enterprise Architectures, presents and discusses a resource-based and service-oriented metamodel and EA framework, in which mobility is introduced naturally from scratch, constituting the basis for some guidelines on which EA resources
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should be mobilized. Several simple scenarios are presented in the light of this metamodel and framework. Although mobile phones have become an extension of the workplace, organizations are still exploring their effectiveness for employee training and development. A 2009 joint collaborative study between Columbia University (New York, USA) and IBM of 400 IBM employees’ use of mobile phones revealed unexpected insights into how employees use mobile applications to improve job performance. The findings are reshaping IBM Learning's mobile technologies strategy for networking, collaboration, and skills improvement. Research-Based Insights Inform Change in IBM M-Learning Strategy reveals the study's results and IBM's new direction for m-learning, highlighting IBM’s preparedness for a shift in its organizational learning model potentiated by ubiquitous access and mobility. Location-based mobile services (LBMS) are at present an ever growing trend, as found in the latest and most popular mobile applications launched. They are, indeed, supported by the hasty evolution of mobile devices capabilities; by users demand; and, lastly, by market drive. With e-commerce, products and services started arriving to potential customers through desktop computers, where they can be bought and fast delivered to a given address. However, expressions such as “being mobile”, “always connected”, “anytime anywhere” that already characterize life in the present will certainly continue to do so in the near future. Meanwhile, mobile devices centred commerce services seem to be the next step. Therefore, Chapter 55, Location Based E-commerce System: An Architecture, presents a system architecture designed for location-based e-commerce systems. These systems, where location plays the most important role, enable a remote products/services search, based in user parameters: after a product search, shops with that products are returned in the search results and are displayed in a map, around the user present location; and services like obtaining more information, reserving and purchasing are made available as well. This concept represents a mix between traditional client-oriented commerce and faceless mass-oriented e-commerce, enabling a proximity-based user-contextualized system, being well capable of conveying significant advantages and facilities to both service-providers/retailers and users. The four chapters of Section 5, Security, address the topic of security in mobile systems and applications. Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are a promising communication scenario. Several new applications are envisioned, which will improve traffic management and safety. Nevertheless, those applications have stringent security requirements, as they affect road traffic safety. Moreover, VANETs face several security threats. As VANETs present some unique features (e.g. high mobility of nodes, geographic extension, etc.) traditional security mechanisms are not always suitable. Because of that, a plethora of research contributions have been presented so far. Chapter 56, Overview of Security Issues in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks, aims to describe and analyze the most representative VANET security developments. Access control in the domain of information system security refers to the process of deciding whether a particular request made by a user to perform a particular operation on a particular object under the control of the system should be allowed or denied. For example, the access control component of a file server might have to decide whether user “Alice” is allowed to perform the operation “delete” on the object “document.txt”. For traditional access control this decision is based on the evaluation of the identity of the user and attributes of the object. The novel idea of location-aware access control is also to consider the user’s current location which is determined by a location system like GPS. The main purpose of Chapter 57, Modelling of Location-Aware Access Control Rules, is to present several approaches for the modeling of location-aware access control rules. The aim of Chapter 58, Secure Techniques for Remote Reconfiguration of Wireless Embedded Systems, is to give a thorough overview of secure remote reconfiguration technologies for wireless embedded systems, and of the communication standard commonly used in those systems. In particular, we focus
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on basic security mechanisms both at hardware and protocol level. We will discuss the possible threats and their corresponding impact level. Different countermeasures for avoiding these security issues are explained. Finally, we present a complete and compact solution for a service-oriented architecture enabling secure remote reconfiguration of wireless embedded systems, called the STRES system. The evolution of computer networking is moving from static wired networking towards wireless, mobile, infrastructureless, and ubiquitous networking. In next-generation computer networks, new mobility features such as, seamless roaming, vertical handover, and moving networks are introduced. Security is a major challenge in developing mobile and infrastructureless networks. Specific security threats in next-generation networks are related to the wireless access mediums, routing, and mobility features. Chapter 59, Secure Routing and Mobility in Future IP Networks, identifies these threats, and discuss the state of the art of security research and standardization within the area, proposing security architectures for mobile networking. A survey of security in routing is provided with special focus on mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The security of currently relevant protocols for management or node and network mobility, Mobile IP (MIP), Network Mobility (NEMO), Mobile Internet Key Exchange (MOBIKE), Host Identity Protocol (HIP), Mobile Stream Control Transmission Protocol (mSCTP), Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP), and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), is described. Section 6 Applications, Surveys and Case Studies is focused on the presentation of a wide variety of new applications and solutions, surveys related with adoption of technologies and case studies, along its 18 chapters. In an educational context, technological applications and their supporting infrastructures have been evolved in a way that the use of learning objects is no longer limited to a personal computer, but has been extended to a number of mobile devices. Such evolution leads to the creation of a technological model called m-learning that offers great benefits to education. This educational model resulted in several research projects and some commercial products. Chapter 60, Evaluation of a Mobile Platform to Support Collaborative Learning: Case Study, describes the (re)use of an adapted platform from an API of MLE (Mobile Learning Engine), to create tests, quizzes, forums, SMS, audio, video, mobile learning objects, in combination with a learning platform in a particular setting. MLE is a special m-learning application for mobile phones (a J2ME application) that can access a LMS (Learning Management System) and use most of its activities and resources, and add new, even innovative, activities. With J2ME one can store, use content and learn without the need of further network access and even use interactive questions that can be directly solved on mobile devices. The MLE enables one to use the mobile phone as a constant way of learning. As a consequence it is possible to use every spare time to learn, no matter where we are, providing new opportunities to enhance learning. Wireless ad-hoc and sensor networks are experiencing a widespread diffusion due to their flexibility and broad range of potential uses. Nowadays they are the underlying core technology of many industrial and remote sensing applications. Such networks rely on battery-operated nodes with a limited lifetime. Although, in the last decade, a significant research effort has been carried out to improve the energy efficiency and the power consumption of the sensor nodes, new power sources have to be considered to improve node lifetime and to guarantee a high network reliability and availability. Energy scavenging is the process by which the energy derived from external sources is captured, translated into an electric charge and stored internally to a node. At the moment, these new power sources are not intended to replace the batteries, since they cannot generate enough energy; however, working together with the conventional power sources they can significantly improve node lifetime. Low-power operation is the result of a complex cross-layer optimization process, for this reason, this chapter “Power Issues and
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Energy Scavenging in Mobile Wireless ad-hoc and Sensor Networks”, thoroughly reviews all the traditional methods aimed at reducing power consumption at network, MAC and PHY levels of the TCP stack, to understand advantages and limitations of such techniques, and to justify the need of alternative power sources that may allow, in the future, the design of completely self-sustained and autonomous sensor nodes. Chapter 62, A Low Cost Wireless Sensors Network with Low-Complexity and Fast-Prototyping, presents a low cost/fast prototyping wireless sensors network that was designed for a huge range of applications and making use of low cost commercial of the shelf components. Such applications includes industrial measurements, biomedical, domestic monitoring, remote sensing, among others. The concept of the wireless sensor network is presented and simultaneously, hot topics and their implementation are discussed. Such topics are valuable tools and can't be discarded when a wireless sensors network is planed. By the contrary, such tools must be taken in account to make the communications between the nodes and the base station the best possible reliable. The architecture, protocols and the reasons that were behind the selection of the components are also discussed. The chapter also presents performance metrics that are related to with the physical characteristics of sensors and with the radio specificity. Microcontrollers with a RISC architecture are used by the network nodes to control the communication and the data acquisition and operate in the 433 MHz ISM band with ASK modulation. Also, in order to improve the communication and to minimise the lost of data, it is predicted to put the wireless nodes to handle line and source coding schemes. Failure detection is an important abstraction for the development of fault-tolerant middleware, such as group communication toolkits, replication and transaction services. Unreliable failure detector (namely, FD) can be seen as an oracle which provides information about process failures. The dynamics and selforganization of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) introduce new restrictions and challenges for the implementation of FDs with which static traditional networks do not have to cope. It is worth mentioning that in some way, fault tolerance is more critical for MANETs than for the latter, since wireless network can present high error rates and mobile nodes are more prone to failures, physical damages or transient disconnections. The aim of Chapter 63 Unreliable Failure Detectors for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks is thus to discuss the impact of all these characteristics, intrinsic to MANET, in the implementation of FDs. It presents a survey of the few works about FD implementations for wireless networks, including the different possible assumptions to overcome the dynamics and lack of both global view and synchrony of MANETs. Adaptation of communication is needed to maintain the connectivity and quality of communication in group-wide collaborative activities. This becomes quite a challenge to handle when mobile entities are part of a wireless environment, in which responsiveness and availability of the communication system are required. In Chapter 64, Mission-Aware Adaptive Communication for Collaborative Mobile Entities, these challenges are addressed within the context of the ROSACE project where mobile ground and flying robots have to collaborate either between themselves or with remote artificial and human actors during save and rescue missions in the event of disasters such as forest fires. This chapter presents our first results. The final goal is to propose new concepts, models and architectures that supports cooperative adaptation which is aware of the mission being executed. Thus, the communication system can be adequately adapted in response to predictable or unpredictable evolutions of the activity requirements and to the unpredictable changes in the communication resource constraints. In the last years ontologies are being used in the development of pervasive computing applications. It is habitual their use for facilitating the interoperability among context-aware applications and the entities
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that may enter in the context at any time. Chapter 65 OntoHealth: An Ontology Applied to Pervasive Hospital Environments presents OntoHealth: an ontology applied to health pervasive environment and a tool to its processing. The main idea is that a hospital could be seen as this pervasive environment, where someone, through ubiquitous computing, engages a range of computational devices and systems simultaneously, in the course of ordinary activities, and may not necessarily even be aware that they are doing so. With the proposed ontology and the tool for its processing, the medical tasks can be shared by all components of this pervasive environment. Chapter 66 Adoption of Mobile and Information Technology in an Energy Utility in Brazil deals with the adoption of mobile technology. The case illustrated here is the implementation of mobile and wireless technology – MIT and smartphones – at an energy utility. The objective was to understand the human and social aspects of the adoption of this technology. This paper makes use of the metaphor of hospitality proposed by Ciborra in the late 1990s. The hospitality metaphor was a useful alternative for describing the process of adopting a new technology. It touches on technical aspects and notes human reactions that become evident when a technician comes across an unknown ‘guest’, the new technology: the doubtful character of the guest, the reinterpretation of the identities of guest and host during the process, learning through trial and error, the technology’s ‘drift’, the participants’ emotions and state of mind, and the appropriation of, and the care for, the new technology. Context-aware mobile applications are becoming popular, as a consequence of the technological advances in mobile devices, sensors and wireless networking. Nevertheless, developing a context-aware system involves several challenges. For example, what will be the contextual information, how to represent, acquire and process this information and how it will be used by the system. Some frameworks and middleware have been proposed in the literature to help programmers to overcome these challenges. Most of the proposed solutions, however, neither have an extensible ontology-based context model nor uses a communication method that allows a better use of the potentialities of the models of this kind, as discussed in Chapter 67 Infrastructures for Development of Context-Aware Mobile Applications. Chapter 68 A Practice Perspective on Transforming Mobile Work introduces a study that explores users’ experiences during an organizational implementation of a new mobile information technology in public home care environment. The home care case illustrates differences between implementation project goals and expectations, and on the other hand, the daily organizing and carrying out care work, where previously, no information technology was utilized. While implementing mobile technology was expected to enhance the efficiency of care working, the project outcomes include resistance due to surveillance aspect of the new technology as well as technological problems during the implementation. Successful outcomes of the implementation include better planning of working hours and more even distribution of work resources. In Chapter 69, Data Replication Support for Collaboration in Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing Environments, the authors address techniques to improve the productivity of collaborative users by supporting highly available data sharing in poorly connected environments such as ubiquitous and mobile computing environments. We focus on optimistic replication, a well known technique to attain such a goal. However, the poor connectivity of such environments and the resource limitations of the equipments used are crucial obstacles to useful and effective optimistic replication. The authors analyze state-of-the art solutions, discussing their strengths and weaknesses along three main effectiveness dimensions: (i) faster strong consistency, (ii) with less aborted work, while (iii) minimizing both the amount of data exchanged between and stored at replicas; and identify open research issues.
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Wireless Local Area Networks are very useful for the most applications based on network. It can be developed in almost all environments and products are cheap and robust. Moreover, these networks can be formed by different devices with wireless interfaces like IP cameras, laptops, PDAs, sensors, etc. WLANs provide high bandwidth at large coverage areas, which it is necessary in many applications at different research areas. All these characteristics let WLANs be a useful technology to provide ubiquity for any type of service. If they are deployed from a good and exhaustive design, they can provide connection to any device, everywhere at anytime. Chapter 70, Providing Outdoor and Indoor Ubiquity with WLANs, presents a complete guideline about how to design and deploy WLANs and to get their best performance. The authors start from an analytical point of view and we use mathematical expressions to design WLANs in both indoor and outdoor environments. Then, the authors introduce a method proposed by some authors of this chapter some years ago and how it can be used to design WLANs in indoor environments. The authors also show WLANs design in outdoor environments and describe two projects developed in order to provide ubiquity in real indoor and outdoor environments. Chapter 71, INTIC for Mobile Devices: Support System for Communication with Mobile Devices for the Disabled introduces the In-TIC system for mobile devices Integration with ICT system for mobile devices) that represents an approach towards the area of technical aids for mobile devices. The mobile telephone is a device that makes our lives easier, allowing us to be permanently accessible and in contact, to save relevant information, and also for entertainment purposes. However, people with visual, auditory or motor impairment or the elderly still find these devices difficult to use. They have to overcome a range of difficulties when using mobile telephones: the screens are difficult to read, the buttons are too small to use, and the technical features are too complicated to understand. At present, the main advances in mobile technology have been aimed at improving multimedia-messaging services and reproducing videos and music. This new support system adds accessibility to mobile telephones, making them easier to use for the people who need them the most, people with reduced physical or mental capacities who cannot use a conventional mobile. Granxafamiliar.com is a project for developing the Galician rural milieu both socio-economically and culturally in order to appreciate the quality of life and rural culture, to create communication links between the rural and urban world, to emphasize the importance of the traditional self-supply production market of Galician family farms, and to promote the spread of new technologies as a social intervention tool against the phenomenon of social and territorial exclusion known as the “Digital Divide". The authors of New Ways to Buy and Sell: An Information Management Web System for the Commercialization of Agricultural Products from Family Farms without Intermediaries are planning the architecture of www.granxafamiliar.com, which is developing the creation of a virtual community based on boosting commercial transactions and the possibilities for buying and selling traditional self-supply products that exist in the rural environment. The authors expect to promote it globally across the Internet by promoting the use and spread of ICTs as tools and commercial channels for agricultural products and intend to carry out an in-depth empirical and theoretical study of the territorial and social effects linked to the development of the information and communication society in rural communities. Their aim is to assist the progress of public decision-making and administrative efficiency for when the time comes to invest in suitable services and activities related to the information society in the rural environment. The continuous growth of the available throughput, especially in the uplink of mobile phone networks is opening the doors to new services and business opportunities without references in the past. In more concrete, new standards HSDPA/HSUPA, introduced to complement and enhance 3G networks, together with the advances in audio and especially video coding, like those adopted by the standard H.264 AVC
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have boosted the appearance of a new service: exploiting the mobile telephony networks for contributing broadcast quality videos. This new service is offering just now a low cost, high flexibility alternative that, in a brief period of time, will substitute the current Electronic News Gathering (ENG) Units, giving rise to what is being to be called Wireless Journalism (WENG or WiNG). Chapter 73, Broadcast Quality Video Contribution in Mobility, discusses both the technologies involved and the business opportunities offered by this sector. Once reviewed the state of the art, different solutions will be compared, some of them recently appeared as commercial solutions, like QuickLink 3.5G Live Encoder or AirNow! and others still in research and development processes. Mobile devices are rapidly becoming the most common interface for accessing network resources (Hall 2008). By 2015 the average 18-year old will spend the majority of their computing time on mobile devices (Basso 2009). These trends directly affect institutions of higher learning. Many universities are offering learning initiatives and m-services designed to distribute content and services to mobile devices. Chapter 74, Mobile Device Selection in Higher Education: iPhone vs. iPod Touch, reports findings from an exploratory, longitudinal study at Abilene Christian University, where incoming freshmen received their choice of an Apple iPhone or iPod touch. The findings indicate that users' device selections were affected by their perceptions of the costs of the devices, the devices' relative characteristics, and the social influence of parents. We also found that users' attitude, satisfaction, and confidence about their device selection varied across devices, with iPhone users having more favorable perceptions. The chapter concludes with recommendations for mobile learning initiatives and directions for future research. Chapter 75, Design of Wearable Computing Systems for Future Industrial Environments, investigates the role of context, particularly in future industrial environments, and elaborates how context can be incorporated in a design method in order to support the design process of wearable computing systems. The chapter is initiated by an overview of basic research in the area of context-aware mobile computing. The aim is to identify the main context elements which have an impact upon the technical properties of a wearable computing system. Therefore the authors describe a systematic and quantitative study of the advantages of context recognition, specifically task tracking, for a wearable maintenance assistance system. Based upon the experiences from this study, a context reference model is proposed, which can be considered supportive for the design of wearable computing systems in industrial settings, thus goes beyond existing context models, e.g. for context-aware mobile computing. The final part of this chapter discusses the benefits of applying model-based approaches during the early design stages of wearable computing systems. Existing design methods in the area of wearable computing are critically examined and their shortcomings highlighted. Based upon the context reference model, a design approach is proposed through the realization of a model-driven software tool which supports the design process of a wearable computing system while taking advantage of concise experience manifested in a well-defined context model. In 2002, Belgium has adopted an electronic identity card as one of the first countries in Europe. By the end of 2009, the roll-out of the eID card will be completed, and this means that each Belgian citizen will possess an eID card. The card enables her to digitally prove her identity and to legally sign electronic documents. The Belgian eID card opens up new opportunities for the government, its citizens, service providers and application developers. The Belgian eID technology originally aimed at facilitating transactions between Belgian citizens and the government and although many eID applications have been developed, the success of the Belgian eID technology has not been what was expected. Therefore, the Belgian government encourages developers to build commercial applications that use the eID card (for authentication or e-signatures). However, extending the scope of the Belgian eID technology from
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e-government to the commercial sector is no sinecure and not without risks. These issues are analysed in Extending the Scope of eID Technology: Threats and Opportunities in a Commercial Setting. Mobile information work, an extreme type of information work, is progressively becoming commonplace in various corporations. The availability of cheap and portable information technologies as well as the development of pervasive communication infrastructure in some parts of the world is creating scenarios where people can work from almost anyplace. Nevertheless up to now there has not been sufficient research on the particular work practices and strategies these professional workers use to be productive as they face the particular challenges of being mobile. Based on an ethnographic investigation of the experiences of mobile professional workers in a multi-national accountancy company, Chapter 77 Mobility and Connectivity: On the Character of Mobile Information Work, discusses some characteristics defining the character of modern information work with regards mobility and connectivity while operating outside the workplace. The study highlights the importance of: location in terms of providing an adequate atmosphere and infrastructure to conduct work; regularity in terms of giving workers flexibility to connect and reconnect whenever it was more convenient for them; space in terms of letting people preserve and reconstruct their information workspaces; and balance while juggling between personal and work related commitments. The findings presented can be useful for defining the processes and technological tools supporting mobile professional workers.
EXPECTATIONS Along these 77 chapters, the reader is faced with the discussions and confirmation of the relevance and impact of this hot topic, providing professionals, researchers and scholars, with some of the most advanced research developments, solutions, state-of-the-art enabling technologies, discussions and case studies on mobility and computing. The handbook is expected to support a professional audience of top managers, IT professionals, technology solution providers and an academic audience (teachers, researchers and students, mainly of post-graduate studies). As an academic tool, it can be a support to disciplines of post-graduate studies on IT/IS. We hope you find it useful. Enjoy your reading and study! Maria Manuela Cruz-Cunha Polytechnic Institute of Cávado e Ave, Portugal Fernando Moreira Universidade Portucalense, Portugal
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Acknowledgment
Editing a book is a quite hard but compensating and enriching task, as it involves a set of different activities like contacts with authors and reviewers, discussion and exchange of ideas and experiences, process management, organization and integration of contents, and many other, with the permanent objective of creating a book that meets the public expectations. And this task cannot be accomplished without a great help and support from many sources. As editors we would like to acknowledge the help, support and believe of all who made possible this creation. First of all, the edition of this book would not have been possible without the ongoing professional support of the team of professionals of IGI Global. We are grateful to Dr. Mehdi Khosrow-Pour and to Mrs. Jan Travers, Managing Director, for the opportunity and belief in this project. A very very special mention of gratitude is due to Mrs. Christine Bufton, Assistant Development Editor, and to Mr. Dave DeRicco and Mr. Michael Killian, Editorial Assistants, for their highly professional support and friendly words of advisory, encouragement and prompt guidance. We also address our recognition and appreciation to all the staff at IGI Global, whose contributions throughout the process of production and making this book available all over the world was invaluable. We are grateful to all the authors, for their insights and excellent contributions to this book. Also we are grateful the authors who simultaneously served as referees for chapters written by other authors, as well as to the external referees and to the members of the editorial advisory board, for their insights, valuable contributions, prompt collaboration and constructive comments. Thank you all, authors and reviewers, you made this book! The communication and exchange of views within this truly global group of recognized individualities from the scientific domain and from industry was an enriching and exciting experience! We are also grateful to all who accede to contribute to this project, some of them with high quality chapter proposals, but unfortunately, due to several constraints could not have seen their work published. Thank you. Maria Manuela Cruz-Cunha Polytechnic Institute of Cávado e Ave, Portugal Fernando Moreira Universidade Portucalense, Portugal
Section 1
Mobile Technologies
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Chapter 1
Evaluating the Context Aware Browser:
A Benchmark for Proactive, Mobile, and Contextual Web Search Davide Menegon University of Udine, Italy Stefano Mizzaro University of Udine, Italy Elena Nazzi University of Copenhagen, Denmark Luca Vassena University of Udine, Italy
ABSTRACT The authors discuss the evaluation of highly interactive and novel context-aware system with a methodology based on a TREC-like benchmark. We take as a case study an application for Web content perusal by means of context-aware mobile devices, named Context-Aware Browser. In this application, starting from the representation of the user’s current context, queries are automatically constructed and used to retrieve the most relevant Web contents. Since several alternatives for query construction exist, it is important to compare their effectiveness, and to this aim we developed a TREC-like benchmark. We present our approach to early stage evaluation, describing our aims and the techniques we apply. The authors underline how, for the evaluation of context-aware retrieval systems, the benchmark methodology adopted can be an extensible and reliable tool. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch001 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
Evaluating the Context Aware Browser
INTRODUCTION The diffusion of mobile devices and real-world mobile users have moved the static world of classical and Web Information Retrieval (IR) towards a dynamic and evolving context-based world. The notion of context (roughly described as the situation the user is in), and the information it conveys, is gaining increasing importance for the development of new IR systems. The concepts of context and awareness convey to the dynamic nature of the user needs, to the complexity of the information available, and of the relevance of this information. When combined with context-awareness, IR has been named Context-Aware Retrieval (CAR) (Brown, 2001). Starting from considering only a low number of contextual features (location and time), current CAR systems entail such an amount of data that a new challenge for IR is how those data can enhance user satisfaction. How to evaluate the strategies and techniques that CAR systems use for this purpose is another challenge. CAR systems imply a high amount of interactivity with the user, and a user study seems the most sensible approach. But our approach is to evaluate highly interactive and novel contextaware systems on the basis of a TREC-like benchmark methodology. This paper describes our methodology, presents the results obtained, and discusses the general approach. The present work is related to the ContextAware Browser (CAB for short), a novel contextaware retrieval application. CAB allows a proactive context-aware Web content perusal by means of mobile devices. Since several alternatives for the retrieval process exist, it is important to compare their effectiveness to find the best approach. With this in mind, we propose an evaluation benchmark, discuss its limits, and test it. Although we focus on the needs of CAB, the problems to solve are typical of any proactive context-aware retrieval system.
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We first briefly survey evaluation methodologies in IR and in CAR systems (Sect. Related Work), introducing our case study application. We then present our early evaluation approach (Sect. Experimental Evaluation) describing aims, techniques, and results. We discuss the reliability and usefulness of our methodology in Sect. Discussion, while in Sect. Lessons Learned we present the lessons learned. Finally in Sec. Conclusions we draw some conclusion and present future work.
RELATED WORK Context-Aware Retrieval With the spread of the concepts related to context-aware computing, Information Retrieval has gained new and increasing importance. The newborn field of CAR, instead of concentrating only on topicality, incorporates contextual information into the retrieval process, aiming at discovering “the query behind the context”: to retrieve what the users need, even if they did not issue any query (Mizzaro, 2008). CAR systems are concerned with the acquisition and understanding of context, and with a behavior based on the recognized context. Thus the CAR model includes, among the elements of the classical IR model, the user’s context. This context is both used in the query formulation process and associated with the documents candidate for retrieval. Typical CAR applications present the following characteristics (Jones, 2004): a mobile user, i.e., a user whose context is changing; interactive or automatic actions, if there is no need to consult the user; time dependency, since the context may change; appropriateness and safety to disturb the user. Although CAR applications can be both interactive and proactive in their communication with the user, we concentrate on the proactive aspects, since they are more relevant to our proposal. Besides, we concentrate on the association between CAR and mobile application, as they
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can be considered as the prime field for CAR (Jones, 2004).
The Context-Aware Browser Idea & Architecture The Context Aware Browser (CAB) is a generalpurpose solution to Web content fruition by means of context-aware mobile devices. It allows a “physical browsing”: browsing the digital world based on the situations in the real world. The main idea behind CAB is to empower a generic mobile device with a browser able to automatically and dynamically load web pages, services and applications selected according to the current context the user is in. Despite the apparent simplicity of this approach, a more thorough definition has to take into account several features; whence, we can say that the Context-Aware Browser is best described by the sum of the following parts: •
•
•
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a Web browser: CAB is able to interpret and render in a sound way (X)HTML code, to interpret client side (e.g., JavaScript) code, and to fully exploit AJaX-based applications; a context-aware application: CAB is able to automatically retrieve and constantly update the contextual information gathered from the surrounding environment (this feature allows CAB to provide contents varying in dependence of the current context of the user); a search engine: CAB is able to search both for “traditional” web pages and applications on the Web and for specifically tailored applications, as we will see in the following; a proactive application able to automatically search for and download contents: the resources retrieved by the search engine are automatically filtered against user’s
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preferences and several other parameters, in order to reduce the cognitive load imposed on the user by automatically selecting the most appropriate contents; an application working on any kind of Web content, i.e., both Web pages and applications: CAB is able to manage both static resources (e.g., plain (X)HTML pages) and dynamic ones requiring user interaction (e.g., web applications).
The CAB acquires information related to the user and the surrounding environment, by means of sensors installed on the device or through external servers. This information, combined with the user’s personal history and the community behavior, is exploited to infer the user’s current context (and its likelihood) that is represented by a list of terms. In the subsequent retrieval process, starting from this list of terms, a query is automatically built and sent to an external search engine, in order to find the most suitable Web pages for the sensed context. In this paper we study different strategies to build automatically the query sent to the external search engine. We provide some more details on CAB implementation. Figure 1 shows CAB overall three-tiered architecture, where the topmost layer manages the interaction with the user, the medium layer bridges the topmost and the inner layer, which in turn is responsible for sensors, inferential network, and filtering engine management. The main modules of CAB architecture are: •
Context server and Sensors. They are responsible for collecting and sending to the CAB Core the contextual information gathered from the surrounding environment, in the form of an inferential network that represents (part of) the knowledge base of the Context manager. Then, all the sensors specified are instantiated by the Context manager. Such sensors communicate with the Context server in order to re-
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Figure 1. CAB architecture
•
•
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ceive the contextual information (location, date/time, temperature, etc.), in either push or pull mode. Context manager, and its internal inferential system are the core component responsible for the synthesis of the current context, starting from the contextual information gathered by sensors. Filter module and the Descriptor search engine are in charge to search for and filter the most suitable contents according to the
inferred context. The contextual information, obtained from the Context manager, is represented through a Context Descriptor that holds the most important information related to the user’s current context. CAB allows the user to specify which filtering information is public and which one is private to achieve a reasonable privacy level. Public information is used to formulate the query to be sent to the Descriptor search engine out of the device, while private in-
Evaluating the Context Aware Browser
•
•
formation is used in “internal” filtering activities only. Connector is an infrastructure component used to separate the user interface from the context management part. This abstraction allows to easily change the way users interact with the system, or to modify the techniques exploited for the current context inference and management. Currently, as the user interface is Web-browser based, the Connector is implemented as a local web server, being able to open HTTP connections and to manage browser’s requests. Browser module manages the presentation of the web contents to the user and it also automatically starts the most relevant ones. Such features are implemented in two submodules: the AJaX engine and the User interface.
Scenario To better understand the CAB functioning we present a simple example scenario, where we consider a tourist visiting a museum. As she enters the museum main hall with her own mobile device, a Web page with the list of the collections available in the museum is presented to her (e.g., the official museum home page, or a mobile adapted version). While the user action has simply been to enter the museum, the CAB has received, analyzed, and collected contextual information and then retrieved the associated resources. Moving around the museum the tourist is guided by the system that contextually retrieves the most interesting information (Figure 2): moving towards an artwork the tourist will automatically obtain the detailed description of that artwork. Because of the huge amount of information that is relevant to each artwork, the ubiquitous search has to be precise and has to provide only the information interesting and important for the tourist, based on her preferences, activities, interests and based on the community behavior
and on the accuracy of the same information. In fact, when the tourist comes near an artwork, the detailed description automatically provided, is accompanied with pictures, comments by experts or other tourists, etc. As usual, the most interesting artworks are surrounded by lots of people. In this case, since the user has to wait in the queue, she cannot yet see the painting, so probably she is not particularly interested in the detailed description. In this situation the system detects the crowd situation and retrieves different resources, like for example Web pages with podcasts about that artwork. If the tourist takes into consideration those resources the system annotates them with the tourist’s context; hence, other users arriving near the painting in crowded situations, are more likely to get the podcast or the text description otherwise.
Evaluation In the development of a CAR system for mobile environments, evaluation plays an important role, as it allows to measure the effectiveness of the system and to better understand problems from both the system and the user interaction point of view. The challenges for context-aware computing evaluation have been studied deeply (Scholtz, 2001; Carter, 2004). In particular these challenges are: the need to identify meaningful metrics (each single application has peculiar aspects to be evaluated that differ from other types of applications); the difficulty to evaluate in small scale a system that is meant to be adopted by many users; the explicit testing of a novel system, meant to be integrated in everyday life and thus invisible, as the basic vision of Ubiquitous computing (Weiser, 1991). Depending on resources and aims, different evaluation metrics are chosen and different evaluation approaches are adopted (e.g., user studies and benchmark; lightweight and heavyweight (Harper, 1997); etc.). As CAR applications are strictly related to users, the user-centered evaluation (live or in laboratory) seems the most natural
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Figure 2. CAB employed in a museum (iPhone and Android version) (a) List of available information and services;(b) Detailed contextual information
one. In (Scholtz, 2004), for example, a framework for user evaluations of ubiquitous computing has been proposed. A detailed work about metrics for evaluating systems for information access has been done in (Scholtz, 2006). More recently, in AmbieSense (Göker, 2008), a user centered, iterative, and progressive evaluation has been adopted combining IR evaluation methods with humancomputer interaction development techniques. Another largely adopted evaluation methodology is benchmark evaluation. Taking example from TREC initiative for large scale evaluation of IR effectiveness (http://trec.nist.gov/), benchmarks are defined by a collection of topics (expressions of user’s information needs), a collection of resources to retrieve, and a set of relevance judgments about those resources for each topic. GeoCLEF (http:// www.uni-hildesheim.de/geoclef/) is an example of
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a benchmark for Geographical IR (GIR) system evaluation. It is based on CLEF (http://www. clef-campaign.org/) and it has the aim to provide a framework for evaluation of systems with search tasks involving both spatial and multilingual aspects. Its importance is given by the large collection of topics and documents, but its focus is on users with geographical related tasks, not really on mobile user, in mobile environments. Within the CAR field, a benchmark evaluation named MREC (MoBe Retrieval Evaluation Collection) (Mizzaro, 2008) has been proposed to evaluate MoBe (Bulfoni, 2008) a framework for CAR of mobile applications. Although it is usually considered the most appropriate for CAR applications, the user evaluation approach has also some, not negligible, drawbacks, when compared with benchmarks. First it is an
Evaluating the Context Aware Browser
Figure 3. A (part of a) context descriptor
high level evaluation, where the primary interest is to study how the system satisfies the user’s needs, rather than on how the system serves the information needs of its users. Benchmark evaluations, on the contrary, are system centered: they directly focus on the evaluation of implementation details, and they can evaluate different aspect of the retrieval process. Second a mature prototype to test has to be available, complete of an effective user interface. This contrasts with the purposes of developers, and it forces significant implementation decisions uncovered by evaluations. Moreover user evaluation is more complex to perform, requires much more time than benchmarks, and it is more dependent on users’ subjectivity.
EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION Although CAB application development is in an advanced phase, its retrieval mechanism needs a more accurate implementation. An early evaluation of the strategies we would like to implement is needed, so, considering the successful approach of MREC and the useful insights obtained, we adopted again a TREC-like benchmark evaluation, named CREC (CAB Retrieval Evaluation Collec-
tion). CREC focuses on the retrieval of Web pages and starts from the results obtained with MREC. We were interested in the following questions: how to build in an automatic way the queries to be sent to the external engine? Which is the best strategy in terms of effectiveness? How does the retrieval effectiveness change on the basis of the increase/decrease of the number of terms in the query, or of different kinds of terms exploited in the query? How effective is an automatic query formulation compared to a user manual search?
CREC: An Incremental Benchmark CREC is constituted by the usual TREC three components: the statements of information needs, a collection of documents, and a set of relevance judgments. The statements of information needs are defined by context descriptors, which represent different examples of user’s contexts in different domains (Figure 3). CREC includes 10 context descriptors, which differ for user activities, location, time, etc.; they have been designed similarly to TREC topics. A unique judge using a four level relevance scale made the relevance judgments: relevant, partially relevant, not classified, or not relevant.
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The
and fields in the context descriptor helped the judgments. The documents collection consisted of Web pages. Due to the evolving behavior of the Web (pages are dynamically added, removed, or modified), we opted for a dynamic collection evolving during the tests. Moreover, and more importantly, if a new implementation of the CAB external search engine needs to be evaluated, CREC will not contain, in general, all the retrieved pages. Since this would make the evaluation not reliable, in our approach the collection is not static: newly retrieved documents, and their judgments extend the collection. We have built two CREC versions so far. The first version was constructed performing 5 manual queries for each context descriptor, and judging the first 150 single retrieved documents for each context descriptor. Starting from this version of the collection, we adopted an “interactive search and judge” (Cormack, 1998) approach to add more relevant documents. In particular, we ran some queries, automatically built from context descriptors and, for each query, the Web pages that were not already in the collection and were retrieved in the first 10 ranks were added to the collection and judged. This second version of the collection had 3634 total pages: 494 relevant, 596 partially relevant, 34 not classified, and 2510 not relevant. Contrary to a real setting where the number of relevant documents is much lower than the number of documents in the collection, CREC collection had a high number of relevant documents because we searched for relevant documents. This is not a problem since we assume that unjudged documents are not relevant. Moreover we are not interested in all the documents, but just in the first retrieved ones.
Strategies We used CREC to compare four automatic query construction strategies. All of them work on lists of terms extracted automatically from the field
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Figure 4. The four strategies and a representation of how they combine the term indexes
<description> of the context descriptor (conversely, the human relevance judge uses the whole context descriptor): for instance, the strategies see the context descriptor in Figure 3 as: “user just landed london heathrow international airport looking flight timetable timetable connections london lunch time”. The strategies are based on two main indexes: tf.idf and geoterms (i.e., terms that refer to geographical information - a term is a geoterm if its Wikipedia page contains geographical coordinates). We chose tf.idf, because it is a classical and largely used IR technique, and geoterms because location is probably the contextual dimension that is more informative of user’s current context. These indexes, differently combined, are used to rank the lists of terms according to their importance in each strategy. The four strategies are (Figure 4): 1. tf.idf: all the significant terms in a context descriptor are taken into account for query
Evaluating the Context Aware Browser
Figure 5. nDCG@10 for the five strategies on all contexts
formulation based on the evaluation of their tf.idf value, in descending order. 2. inverse tf.idf: the previous strategy with terms taken in ascending order. This strategy represents a lower bound to use in the comparisons. 3. geoterms + tf.idf: the query exploits first the geoterms and then the remaining terms ordered by their tf.idf value, in descending order. 4. tf.idf + geoterms: similar to the previous strategy, but at first two terms with the highest tf.idf are introduced, then the geoterms, and then again the following tf.idf terms in descending order. The strategies have been implemented in Java using Yahoo! as external search engine through the API provided (http://developer.yahoo.com/ search/web/).
Results For each strategy and context descriptor, 10 queries of different lengths (from 1 to 10 terms) were automatically formulated, incrementally selecting
the first 10 terms of the ranked lists. Thus our query construction is incremental: once a term is in a query, it will remain in longer queries as well. We measured strategies’ effectiveness by means of a standard IR metric, [email protected] emphasizes quality at the top of the ranked list, and takes into consideration the first 10 retrieved items, which is reasonable for CAB, since the user is unlikely to scroll long lists of retrieved items. The manual approach, where users autonomously define their queries, was our upper reference strategy. In particular, for each context descriptor, a human operator has defined 5 queries. Figure 5 compares the four strategies, with the manual one, showing their effectiveness (nDCG@10, on the Y axis) averaged on all 10 contexts, for different query lengths (on the X axis). We notice four main aspects: 1. all the proposed strategies have lower performances than the manual one; 2. apart from the manual one, the most effective strategy is the geo + tf.idf; 3. in general, the performance of long queries is very low. This is probably because CREC contexts are made up by more than one
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Figure 6. Comparison of manual and geo + tf.idf approach on four contexts
facet (for example different activities), and their descriptors contain terms that relate to these facets. Thus increasing the number of terms in the query, it is more probable to have terms related to different facets, and this could decrease the performance; 4. the manual strategy has a different behavior: its performance tends to increase with query length. If performed by a human, a search session could improve with query refinements that add or change terms on the basis of the knowledge acquired by visualizing results. This is not performed by automatic strategies that construct the query incrementally. This is probably one of the reasons why manual strategy has a performance improvement the more terms are used. Figure 6 shows the comparison of the best automatic strategy and the manual one for four
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different contexts. We learnt that there was not a stable relationship between the two strategies: in some cases the manual had better effectiveness, in some other had worst effectiveness. In general however there is a clear margin to improve automatic approaches to query construction. Different context descriptors involved a different number of geoterms. Thus, to have a uniform view based on the number of geoterms adopted in the queries, we performed more analysis on the geoterms based strategies. The average results among all contexts are shown in Figure 7; in the graphics both the average, min, max values and the variance are shown. For the geoterms + tf.idf approach, the results increased adding the term with the highest tf.idf value after the geoterms, both with only 1 or 2 geoterms. The same is for the tf.idf + geoterms approach. The difference was that in this strategy, we had low performances using only the first 2 terms with highest
Evaluating the Context Aware Browser
Figure 7. Detailed results for the strategies with different number of geoterms
tf.idf value. Thus, from the results presented, we have understood that terms related to locations were more significant in a query, than the terms ordered based on their tf.idf value. In particular, the maximum performance was obtained adding one tf.idf term after all the geoterms. Moreover we noticed that there was no relationship between geoterms and their value in the tf.idf ordered list: in some cases geoterms have a high tf.idf value, in some other a very low one.
DISCUSSION Benchmark Reliability As a unique judge made the relevance judgments, to verify that subjectivity is not an issue for our benchmark, we performed an additional experiment, involving two more judges. We measured inter-judge agreement on a pool of retrieved pages,
and judgments agreed on average on 65% pages (which became 92% after a discussion between judges). Moreover we used the ADM measure (Della Mea, 2004) to better understand the different judgments. The values in the relevance scale, relevant, partially relevant, not classified, and not relevant, correspond respectively to the values 1, 0.5, 0.25, and 0. We obtained ADM values of 0.757 and 0.846 before the discussion, and 0.950 and 0.981 after the discussion. Figure 8 offers a graphic representation: the primary judge is presented on the X axis and a secondary judge (J1) is on the Y axis; the figure on the left is before the discussion between judges, the one on the right is after the discussion. To understand how our approach to collection construction copes with Web dynamics, we performed another experiment. The two secondary judges manually formulated 3 queries, in relation to a given context descriptor. Then we counted
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Figure 8. ADM values for the experiment involving the first secondary judge
the pages retrieved by the secondary judges but not retrieved by the automatically constructed queries, and among them the relevant pages. J1 retrieved 63 new never judged pages (21 relevant), while J2 retrieved 56 (34 relevant). This shows that new pages have appeared on the Web at a fast pace or, more probably, the initial collection was not complete. The new retrieved pages were also added to the collection, and the effectiveness evaluation was performed again. The dashed line in Figure 5 shows the effectiveness of geo + tf.idf computed considering the new pages and judgments: it does not change significantly. From the results CREC seems complete and reliable at least to a reasonable extent, and for its aims.
Benchmark Extensibility Like the Web, also our collection is in continuous evolution, thus we performed an additional experiment to understand the effort necessary to extend it. On the basis of a context descriptor not used in the benchmark reliability experiments, two judges
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(J and a new J3) are taken to build a manual query and then evaluate the retrieved pages (36 pages for person were evaluated). While J3 had never done this experiment before, J is an expert of both the domain, as he was the designer of the contexts descriptors, and of the evaluation procedure, as he already judged pages and he is used to the 4 level relevance scale adopted. The average time needed for the evaluation of one page is 48.9 seconds for J and 62.6s for J3, with a standard deviation of 14.3s for J and 32.3s for J3. The expert then used about 75% of the time needed by the not expert to perform the new judgments. Since the average time to evaluate a page is 55.7s, and since there are 2405 different pages from the first to the second version of our collection, the time to increase the collection was about 37 hours.
LESSONS LEARNED From this research we learned several kinds of lessons. Concerning the CAB development process, the CREC benchmark gave good insights
Evaluating the Context Aware Browser
(e.g., in the best strategy, the best performance appears just adding a term after the “geoterms”) and underlined weak points (e.g., adding more and more terms in the query does not increase performance). A more general outcome concerns the evaluation procedure. We understood that our approach is useful as it can simplify the user testing evaluation. For example, knowing which is the best strategy allows us to give to users one prototype, instead of different prototypes, one for each strategy. Moreover, once the benchmark is configured, it can be reused to test new strategies or related features, in a semi-automatic way (new judgments are needed but the update time is reasonable). Our approach seems interesting and valid for IR applications that need high precision, like CAB (for which nDCG@10 is an adequate metric). However, with high recall, the effort for the new judgments would probably be too high. A third general consideration concerns the relationship between relevance and usefulness in the context-aware retrieval field. In this work the information need gathered from the user’s context is adopted as reference point to judge the Web pages in the collection. In classical IR, we considered a page relevant if it provides an answer to the user’s information need. However, contextual information compounds the overall situation: taking into consideration the context, a page could be relevant for the user, but at the same time not useful. A page with too much information, and thus difficult to read on a mobile device, is not useful for the context, even if it is relevant to the user’s information need. In the same way we can consider a tourist in a town never visited before, without a means of transport, and looking for a tapas (variety of snacks in Spanish cuisine) bar in a rainy day. The system answers to the user query with the page of a tapas bar 10 minutes away, and with a map that guides the user to the destination. These results are highly relevant, but at the same time they could be useless: considering the overall situation in a rainy
day, a ten minutes walk could be unacceptable for a user. From this point of view, a page not useful has still to be considered relevant? The problem here is that in the context-aware retrieval field user’s information needs are not the only element to be considered for relevance: the contextual information represents constraints that can alter the relevance of a document. In particular, contextual values can modify both what the user needs and how the user needs it. The fourth kind of lesson we learned is related to the measures used to estimate the importance of terms related to context. For some experiment we exploited the tf.idf measure and at the beginning it seemed to be a good choice. However, we discovered that it is too much dependent on the context descriptor and, if the contexts were represented and described in a different way, we could have obtained very different tf.idf values. Thus tf.idf and all measures based on terms frequency in context descriptor could not be the proper solution. Moreover, other problems appear when we have to calculate tf.idf values, not in experimental condition, but at runtime, in a real situation. While tf values can be computed directly from the user context descriptor, which are the other contexts (documents) we exploit to compute the idf value? The history of previous contexts? Or other users’ contexts? Differently from documents, that are rigidly separated from each other, contexts cannot be easily identified as they are not “watertight compartments” but they continuously flow in each other.
CONCLUSION In this paper we have presented our approach for the evaluation of a CAR application for the mobile environment. We evaluated different strategies for automatic query building based on users’ current context. Despite user testing is the main evaluation technique adopted in this field, the early stage of development of our system and
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the need of measuring the effectiveness of different strategies guided us toward a TREC-like benchmark approach. In this way, we have made our second step to refine a methodology whose aim is to become a general early stage evaluation technique for retrieval processes in context-aware systems. On the basis of our experience, we believe that early stage benchmark evaluations followed by user studies, are an effective methodology to evaluate systems like CAB. The benchmark, in fact, does not substitute the user testing evaluation. Rather, several early stage benchmark experiments could provide more solid basis for the subsequent user testing that can thus be more focused. In the future we will work on two issues: to seek for more effective strategies that better compete with the manual one (e.g., removing the constraint of incremental query construction) and, more generally, to better understand reliability and usefulness of our incremental benchmark approach. It would be also interesting to work towards a publicly available or open source context test collection, containing a set of context descriptors (perhaps with a representation different from TREC topics, and maybe including a temporal longitudinal component as well, e.g., using Schank and Abelson’s scripts), Web resources, and relevance judgments. Finally we plan to execute the experiments in a fully mobile environment and to study how relevance judgments and results change switching from a desktop to a mobile environment.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors acknowledge the financial support of the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) within the FIRB project number RBIN04M8S8, and the region Friuli Venezia Giulia.
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REFERENCES Brown, P. J., & Jones, G. J. F. (2001). Contextaware retrieval: Exploring a new environment for information retrieval and information filtering. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 5(4), 253–263. doi:10.1007/s007790170004 Bulfoni, A., Coppola, P., Della Mea, V., Di Gaspero, L., Mischis, D., Mizzaro, S., et al. (2008). AI on the move: Exploiting AI techniques for context inference on mobile devices. In Proc. of 5th Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems (PAIS 2008), co-located with ECAI08 (pp. 668–672). IOS Press. Carter, S., & Mankoff, J. (2004). Challenges for Ubicomp Evaluation. Technical Report UCBCSD-04-1331, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley. Coppola, P., Lomuscio, R., Mizzaro, S., Nazzi, E., & Vassena, L. (2008). Mobile social software for cultural heritage: A reference model. In 2nd Workshop on Social Aspects of the Web (pp. 69–80). Cormack, G. V., Palmer, C. R., & Clarke, C. L. A. (1998). Efficient construction of large test collections. In SIGIR ’98: Proceedings of the 21st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (pp. 282–289). ACM. Della Mea, V., & Mizzaro, S. (2004). Measuring retrieval effectiveness: A new proposal and a first experimental validation. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55(6), 530–543. doi:10.1002/asi.10408 Göker, A., & Myrhaug, H. (2008). Evaluation of a mobile information system in context. Information Processing & Management, 44(1), 39–65. doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2007.03.011
Evaluating the Context Aware Browser
Harper, D. J., & Hendry, D. G. (1997). Evaluation light. In M. Dunlop (ed.), Proc. of the second MIRA workshop (pp. 53–56). Technical Report TR-1997-2, Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow. Jones, G. J. F., & Brown, P. J. (2004). Contextaware retrieval for ubiquitous computing environments. In: Mobile HCI Workshop on Mobile and Ubiquitous Information Access (pp. 227–243). Volume 2954. Springer LNCS. Mizzaro, S. Nazzi, & E., Vassena, L. (2008). Retrieval of context-aware applications on mobile devices: how to evaluate? In Proc. of Information Interaction in Context (IIiX ’08) (pp. 65–71). ACM. Scholtz, J. (2001). Evaluation methods for ubiquitous computing. Ubicomp Workshop. Scholtz, J. (2006). Metrics for evaluating human information interaction systems. Interacting with Computers, 18, 507–527. doi:10.1016/j. intcom.2005.10.004 Scholtz, J., & Consolvo, S. (2004). Towards a discipline for evaluating ubiquitous computing applications. Technical Report IRS-TR-04-004. Weiser, M. (1991). The computer for the 21st century. Scientific American, 265(3), 94–104. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0991-94
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Mobile Devices: a mobile device (also known as cellphone device, handheld device, handheld computer) is a pocket-sized computing device. Information Retrieval: is the science of searching for documents, for information within documents. Context-Awareness: refers to the idea that computers can both sense, and react based on their environment, and based on the situation they are used in. Context Aware Browser: general-purpose solution to Web content fruition by means of context-aware mobile devices. Proactive: controlling a situation by causing something to happen rather than waiting to respond to it after it happens Evaluation: action of determining how a particular system behaves using criteria against a set of standards Benchmark: in IR a benchmark is composed by a collection of topics (expressions of user’s information needs), a collection of resources to retrieve, and a set of relevance judgments about those resources for each topic. It is a kind of evaluation that aims at measuring performances of systems in a controlled environment.
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Chapter 2
Routing in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks Milos Stojmenovic University of Ottawa, Canada
ABSTRACT Routing is the process of finding a path from a source node to a destination node. Since each node has a limited transmission range, the message is normally forwarded by other nodes in an ad hoc or sensor network. Therefore routes normally consist of several hops. Proposed routing schemes can be divided into topological and position based, depending on the availability of geographic location for nodes. Topological routing may be proactive or reactive. Position based routing consists of greedy approaches applied when a neighbor closer to the destination (than the node currently holding the packet) exists, and recovery schemes otherwise. In order to preserve bandwidth and power which are critical resources in ad hoc and sensor networks, localized approaches are proposed, where each node acts based solely on the location of itself, its neighbors, and the destination. There are various measures of optimality which lead to various schemes which optimize hop count, power, network lifetime, delay, or other metrics. A uniform solution based on ratio of cost and progress is described here
INTRODUCTION Routing is the process of finding a path from a source node to a destination node. Since each node DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch002
has a limited transmission range, the message is normally forwarded by other nodes in an ad hoc or sensor network. Therefore routes normally consist of several hops. Proposed routing schemes can be divided into topological and position based, depending on the availability of geographic
Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
Routing in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks
location for nodes. Topological routing may be proactive, reactive or hybrid. Position based routing consists of greedy approaches applied when a neighbor closer to the destination (than the node currently holding the packet) exists, and recovery schemes otherwise. In order to preserve bandwidth and power which are critical resources in ad hoc and sensor networks, localized approaches are proposed, where each node acts based solely on the location of itself, its neighbors, and the destination. There are various measures of optimality which lead to various schemes which optimize hop count, power, network lifetime, delay, or other metrics. A uniform solution based on ratio of cost and progress is described here. An ad hoc network is a set of interconnected nodes that are deterministically or randomly dispersed in a given area and communicate over a wireless medium. Each of these nodes has the ability to send and receive messages to and from other nodes. Connections are possible over multiple nodes (multihop ad hoc network). Typical examples of ad hoc networks are conference and disaster relief networks. Sensor networks are similar to ad hoc networks in the sense that nodes have the ability to communicate over a wireless medium, but they differ in purpose and communication patterns. Each node in a sensor network is a small, battery powered device that has the capability of measuring or tracking the environment. Sensors can measure distance, speed, humidity, temperature, light, motion, seismic data, torque, and a host of other quantitatively measurable attributes of the environment that they are located in. They differ from ad hoc networks in purpose since each sensor has a specialized purpose of measuring and reporting the measured data. The two types of networks also differ in communication patterns. The nodes in ad hoc networks usually communicate between each other where the source and destination can be any two nodes. In sensor networks, nodes typically only communicate with a base station or sink. They usually only need to report data,
and are not able to perform a certain action based on the collected data, other than transmitting or receiving messages. Therefore, communication in a sensor network is much more structured than in an ad hoc network. Nodes in ad hoc or sensor networks may or may not know their geographic positions. The availability of positional information depends on the hardware of the nodes in the network. Typical devices used for positional information are GPS locators which are relatively small. Positional information is essential in sensor networks. Sensors need to know where they are located in order for whatever they are measuring to make sense to the base station. If a sensor detects fire, for instance, it must report the location of the fire, or else an appropriate response is not possible. However, sensors can be easily equipped with GPS locators, and the sensors themselves are relatively small devices. Positional information of sensors is not an easy problem (Bachrach & Taylor, 2005), but it is definitely an important part of a sensor’s makeup. It is assumed that nodes have equal transmission radii R, where two nodes are neighbors if they are located at most R units away from each other. That is, two nodes can directly communicate if and only if the distance between them is ≤R. This is referred to as the unit disk graph model. The wireless communication medium is different from the wired one. The wired medium normally provides only one-to-one communication, meaning that a message sent to a neighbor is only received by that neighbor. However, the wireless medium enables one-to-all communication, where a message sent by one node is received by all of its neighbors. This provides both advantages and limitations. A single message reaches more nodes; however, at the same time, bandwidth is limited because normally all nodes use the same frequency for communication. Sensors also have a sensing radius, which is normally less than the communication radius.
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Presented protocols are applicable to both ad hoc and sensor networks, with different efficiencies, depending on the network assumptions. The availability of position information and mobility of the destination determines the choice of the corresponding class of protocols. Relative mobility impacts the suitability of protocols. For static nodes, proactive approaches are efficient, while for mobile nodes, reactive ones work better. Changes from active to sleep status at individual nodes also make certain protocols more efficient compared to others.
Routing without Position Information Routing without positional information is more difficult than routing with positional information, and requires more overhead in wireless networks. There are two general methodologies that could be used to route messages if position information is not available: proactive routing, and reactive routing. Proactive routing means that routes must be established before messages are sent through the network. This involves storing routing tables at each node in the network that act as roadmaps for routing. Routing tables are very cumbersome from a memory point of view and costly in the case of mobile nodes. Proactive routing with highly mobile nodes is very impractical since frequent routing table updates are necessary for the scheme to work. It is practical in situations where nodes are mostly static, such as in the case of a conference. Reactive routing is a more practical solution to networks with mobile nodes. Using this routing framework, nodes that need to send a message first need to find the destination node by flooding the network with a route discovery message. The destination node would then reply to the source using the memorized hops through the network. This type of routing is used in ad hoc networks where the network composition is variable. It could also be used in certain scenarios in sensor networks where nodes could turn themselves off
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to conserve energy. New routes would then have to be found.
Routing with Position Information Positional information is helpful for routing in ad hoc networks because it is possible to find a route between two nodes without flooding and without routing tables. In both the cases of sensor networks and ad hoc networks, knowing the positions of nodes facilitates localized routing. Localized routing is a phrase that means routing just by knowing local information. A node that needs to send a message to another node knows its own position, the positions of all of its neighbors, and the position of the destination. Assuming this information is available, simple greedy localized routing protocols exist, which are competitive to the shortest path algorithm for dense networks. There also exist intelligent localized routing algorithms (Bose & Al, 2001), which guaranty delivery of the message to the destination in connected unit disk graphs, without using any memorization at nodes. Localized routing has considerably lower communication overhead compared to approaches using global network information, in networks with mobile nodes, or nodes that change their status between active and sleeping. The main advantage is in the cost of updating the needed network information. Updating information for localized routing is simple: each node periodically transmits a ‘hello’ message, received by all its neighbors. Other approaches require propagating topological changes throughout the network or the exchange of large messages containing routing tables. There must exist node location service mechanisms in ad hoc networks since destination nodes may move, or simply turn themselves off, whereas the location of a sink or base station is normally fixed and known to sensors in sensor networks. This may affect the route of a potential message, and more severely impact the power and bandwidth consumption of nodes due to excess
Routing in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks
communications. The topic of location updates in mobile ad hoc networks is covered in greater detail in (Stojmenovic, 2006). Estimating hop counts between nodes is discussed in (Contla & Stojmenovic, 2003).
TOPOLOGICAL ROUTING Topological routing refers to routing where positional information is not used. We now describe two basic types of topological routing: proactive and reactive.
Proactive Routing A typical example of a proactive routing algorithm is the Bellman-Ford scheme (Jubin & Tornow, 1987). In this framework, each node exchanges its routing table with all of its neighbors and updates its own routing table if better routes to some destinations are available based on the new data. The entries in the routing table for one node are the costs of sending messages from that node to all other nodes using the best know routes. These entries also contain the next forwarding node to send the message to for all known nodes. Routing table exchanges of information are done periodically, so new routes become known gradually, as several iterations of the table exchange step are performed. This protocol is a popular one on the Internet, since most of the nodes are not mobile. In a highly mobile environment, table exchanges would have to be more frequent, which results in high overhead, and an impractical solution. To illustrate the Bellman-Ford technique, we imagine that a source node S has 3 neighbors, and intends to send a message to destination D. We also assume that the table exchanging step is about to be performed. When node S exchanges its routing table with its neighbors, it analyzes which neighbor to send the message to. In the received routing tables, information is listed about the costs of sending a message from that node to node D.
Node S then forwards the message to the node F that minimizes the cost of link S to F plus the cost of sending from F to the destination. Another way to obtain the shortest possible routes between any two pairs of nodes is to run Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm for every pair of nodes in the network (McQuillan & Al, 1980). However, all link and node (topological) changes need to be broadcasted in the network. All nodes then maintain global network information, and are able to make optimal decisions when routing is in progress. Some optimizations are proposed in (Jacquet & Al, 2001), in the form of OLSR (optimized link state routing) protocol. Topological changes are normally broadcasted to all nodes via flooding, where each receiving node will retransmit the message exactly once. OLSR (Jacquet & Al, 2001) limits the retransmissions to certain nodes, which together create a backbone (any node not in the backbone is a direct neighbor to at least one node from the backbone). The specific protocol used, which reduces message flooding, is called Multi Point Relay MPR. Each transmitting node includes the list of neighbors that are asked to retransmit the message in the packet. The selection is made so that all 2-hop neighbors (neighbors of neighbors) are ‘covered’, that is, receive the message only if the selected neighbors retransmit. When a message is received at a node, it simply checks whether it is ‘asked’ to retransmit it or not, and behaves accordingly (Jacquet & Al, 2001). This reduces the flooding driven effects of wasted retransmissions of the original message.
Reactive Routing This type of routing is analogous to tourists trying to find an obscure address in a new city: they get closer and closer to the destination by asking people along the way. There are two variants of reactive routing strategies that we will examine here. They work very similarly, and can almost be considered as extensions of one another. One
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Figure 1. Route discovery
Figure 2. Destination reports back
variant of route discovery is called the Advanced On-demand Distance Vector AODV (Perkins & Royer, 2002), and the other is Dynamic Source Routing DSR (Johnson & Maltz, 1996). The main idea here is that a source node first has to find the destination node before it can start sending messages. Therefore, it floods a route discovery message throughout the entire network. Each node retransmits the packet exactly once, upon the first receipt of it. We turn our attention to Figure 1 to illustrate this procedure. Node S starts flooding the network by passing the route discovery message to all of its neighboring nodes. The flooding is continued as outlined by the green arrows in the same figure. Note that messages are not retransmitted more than once since subsequent copies of the same message are ignored. Flooding is continued as depicted by the dark red and dark blue arrows until the destination is reached. For clarity, retransmissions by nodes that do not reach any node for the first time are not drawn. The route that is uncovered is transmitted back to the source in the reverse order of its discovery, as seen in Figure 2. In the AODV scheme, each node in the path would memorize the next hop back to the source. Thus A records S, B records A, C records B and D records C, which enables D to report to S via C, B and A (see Figure 2). In the DSR variant, the route discovery packet carries the whole paths from the source; therefore, destination D receives the memorized path SABCD. The source would be notified of the entire path to the destination.
After discovering and memorizing the route, S uses it to send actual traffic to D. Messages could now be sent using either hop by hop or total path variants. The described reactive routing algorithm is a basis for several existing protocols applied in specific scenarios. For example, ‘directed diffusion’ (Intanagonwiwat & Al, 2000) is a highly cited routing protocol for sensor networks, applying a ‘data centric’ approach. The data sink identifies a set of attributes and propagates an interest message throughout the network. The interest is flooded blindly. Each receiving node records the interest and establishes a so called gradient, which is simply a link toward a neighbor on a route back to the sink. The protocol is thus algorithmically equivalent to route discovery where the search for an IP address has been replaced with search for data of interest located in some sensors, which have no identities. AODV (Perkins & Royer, 2002) and DSR (Johnson & Maltz, 1996) use the hop count metric (the number of transmissions) as the measure of optimality of a route. The route discovery message might contain several other cost measures which may be taken into consideration while choosing the best path. Depending on the application, cost measures might include delay, congestion or power consumption. Several paths might be available, but the best one is chosen at the destination. Applications in which delay is paramount, such as QoS, may require the usage of several paths to the destination to increase bandwidth. The opti-
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mal route from source to destination, measured by a particular metric, may not be the first one that reaches the destination. The route discovery process is therefore modified. When a route discovery packet originating from S is received by node A for the first time, the total cost (on a partial route from S to A) is recorded. Each new route request packet for the same source-destination pair arrives with its new total cost. If that cost is lower than the previously recorded cost, the route request is retransmitted, with that new total cost being appended to the message. Otherwise this message is ignored. A technique for reducing the cost of flooding is an expanding ring search. In this procedure, the source node would send out a route discovery message to its neighboring nodes with an attached time to live TTL variable. This TTL variable is used in determining how many links the route discovery message is permitted to cross from the source node. For instance, the TTL can be set at 2 hops initially to limit the search radius of the initial route discovery message. The idea is that the destination might be near or far away from the source. Instead of flooding the network right away, we try to find the destination among the nodes that are close to the source. If the destination node is not found, then the TTL variable is increased (e.g. doubled), and the radius of the search expands. These expanding ring search phases are repeated until the destination is found. Figure 3 shows a sample network with source and destination nodes labeled as S and D respectively. The purple ellipse marks the area that the route discovery message with TTL 2 would search. The destination is not found in this area, and the TTL is doubled. The aqua green area is searched with a TTL of 4. The destination would be discovered in the next search phase where the TTL is 8.
Hybrid Routing Proactive and reactive routing approaches can be combined into a single approach. Proactive rout-
Figure 3. Expanded ring search strategy
ing is applied if the destination is nearby, while reactive routing is applied when it is far away. For instance, in the ZRP (Zone Routing Protocol) (Beijar, 2002), a zone for a source includes all nodes up to k hops away. Routing information inside its zone is constantly updated. Proactively, whenever a link state is changed, a notice is sent k hops away by flooding. Therefore, the source always knows how to reach a destination that is at most k hops away. Routing to a destination that is not nearby (more than k hops away) is done by the reactive approach. A route discovery message is flooded in the network until a zone containing the destination is found. The border node of that zone then can report back to the source.
POSITION BASED ROUTING Advance Mode Routing In this section, we consider the situation where nodes are equipped with positional information. The positions of each node’s neighbors may be obtained by occasional exchanges of ‘hello’ messages.
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Cost to Progress Routing Framework We will now describe a general routing framework (Stojmenovic-2, 2006) which is applicable for a variety of cost metrics. It is understood here that each message sent between two nodes has an inherent cost associated with it, and a progress value. The cost of transmitting a message between two nodes can be defined in several ways. Typically, it falls under hop count, power consumption and delay. Progress measures the advancement of the message toward the destination. One way to measure progress is by considering the distance of the message to the destination. In Figure 4, we see a network with labeled nodes, and cost values at each edge. The red sequence of arrows is the shortest path from source S to destination D. We require global information about the network (locations of all nodes) in order to be able to find the shortest path. However, we are confined to local information. Therefore, node S has the option of forwarding the message to one of nodes F, I and K. It is proposed here that the cost of the next link should be compared to the progress made by forwarding it to that link. Therefore, values: 18/ (|SD|-|FD|), 15/(|SD|-|ID|), and 7/(|SD|-|KD|) are compared and the minimal value determines the next forwarding node in the chain. If such logic is followed, the purple sequence of arrows marks the resulting path the message takes from source to destination. Cost to progress ratio based routing was recently enhanced. Instead of sending directly to neighbor A with the optimal cost to progress ratio, source S constructs the shortest weighted path (with the considered cost as the weight) toward A, and the message is sent along that path until a node B that is closer to D than S is found. Note that intermediate nodes may recompute the path, so that the message remains of constant length. Node B then resumes the same protocol.
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Figure 4. Shortest weighted path and cost to progress ratio protocols
Greedy Routing and MFR Greedy routing in wireless networks was first proposed by Finn (Finn, 1987). In his work, it is understood that the cost metric of sending one message to a neighboring node is one hop. This is a special case of the cost to progress routing framework since it assumes that message sending costs between neighboring nodes are equal regardless of the distance between them. In order to illustrate this point, we observe the network in Figure 4 again. Since the cost of traversing an edge is now one, we can disregard the weights of the edges. Source S still needs to pick one of its neighbors (F, I, or K) to forward the message to. The greedy algorithm now only considers the progress made by forwarding the message to each of these nodes since transmission costs are now constant. By progress, we mean minimizing the distance from the next node to the destination. The algorithm therefore takes the minimum distance of FD, ID, and KD. It chooses I as the next node to forward the message to. The purple arrows again mark the path that the greedy algorithm would choose. A similar progress measure based on distance was proposed by (Takagi & Kleinrock, 1984) called Most Forward within Radius (MFR). Instead of choosing the next forwarding node as the one
Routing in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks
which is minimally distanced from the destination, we take the one whose projection onto the line CD is closest to destination D, as seen in Figure 5. In this figure, node C is deciding where to forward the message intended for destination D. The projections of potential forwarding nodes F, A and G are seen as F’, A’ and G’ respectively. A’ is closest to the destination, and therefore, the message is forwarded to node A. This is loop free algorithm, although by no means a solution that guarantees delivery. Even though loops are not possible, reaching a dead end is, and recovery protocols will be discussed in section 3.2.
Power Aware Routing This form of localized routing was first studied in (Stojmenovic & Lin, 2001). It takes into consideration the power needed to transmit a message to the next node. The power needed to send a packet from C to A is proportional to rα+c, where α is a power attenuation factor (2≤α≤6), r=|CA| is the distance from node C to node A, while c is a constant greater than 0. Constant c accounts for the fixed energy costs of sending and receiving a message and running such an electronic circuit. Power aware routing is another example of localized routing. The algorithm will forward the message to the node A that minimizes the ratio of transmission energy to message progress (rα+c)/ (|CD|-|AD|) (Kuruvila & Al, 2006). One of the disadvantages of power aware routing (as with all of the other greedy algorithms we have seen so far) is that certain routes become popular, and soon the nodes along these routes become drained. It is therefore beneficial to consider a different routing strategy that takes into account the remaining energy of a possible forwarding node before nominating it to continue the routing task. In such cases, nodes have to announce their remaining energy status via periodic ‘hello’ messages. The details of localized power and remaining energy aware routing protocols
Figure 5. Selecting best neighbor in MFR routing protocol
are in (Stojmenovic & Lin, 2001), (Kuruvila & Al, 2006).
QoS Routing Qos routing is highly applicable to multimedia traffic such as on-demand video. In such cases, both time and bandwidth are critical aspects of routing. Routing protocols of this nature will become more popular as handheld portables become more advanced with the ability to access TV programming and other high bandwidth consumption applications. In this type of routing (He & Al, 2005), (Huang, Dai & Wu, 2004), (Stojmenovic-2, 2006), the factor we are interested in limiting is the time it takes to send a message from a source to a destination. We therefore have to consider a broader spectrum of factors that influence message passing. Specifically, we mean the delays experienced if a message is sent to a popular node. By delays, we mean queuing and the time it takes to forward the message. The criteria for selecting the next forwarding node A from current node C is based on minimizing the delay/(|CD|-|AD|).
Beaconless Routing So far, we have seen routing approaches where nodes have local knowledge about their neighbors. Local knowledge is made available by periodically
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Figure 6. Gabriel graph
sending ‘hello’ packets. However, this causes significant overhead, especially if the amount of actual traffic is not high. Furthermore, since nodes may move, or turn themselves off at any time, the information (position or even availability) assumed about neighbors may not be accurate. This leads to suboptimal routing procedures or even unnecessary failures. In such cases, Zorzi (Zorzi, 2004) proposes to have a dynamic neighbor discovery phase where RTS/CTS packets are sent before sending actual routing packets. A node which wishes to send a message first sends out an RTS (ready to send) packet. All receiving neighbors calculate a timeout waiting period, which corresponds to their distance from the destination. Neighbors closer to the destination select shorter timeouts. The neighbor closest to the destination is therefore the first one to respond with a CTS (clear to send) packet. Upon receiving the first response from a neighbor A, current node S transmits the actual message to A. Other neighbors overhear that message which cancels their own possible responses at the end of their timeouts.
Recovery Mode Routing It is possible for a routing algorithm to guarantee delivery of a message while only dealing with local information, and not applying any memorization at nodes (all necessary information arrives with the packet). This face algorithm (Bose & Al, 2001) only assumes that there exists a path from a source
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Figure 7. Marked source and destination
to a destination, and a unit disk graph. The face algorithm is a recovery scheme and is normally applied when the greedy algorithm fails. The details of face and the combined GFG (greedyface-greedy) algorithms are seen in this section.
Face Routing Face routing (Bose & Al, 2001) is an algorithm that guarantees delivery of a message, but does not always have the best performance when it comes to efficiency. This type of routing algorithm has two phases: the construction of a Gabriel graph from the network, and the actual routing phase. Gabriel graphs are planar, which means that no two edges intersect. Planar graphs are a composition of faces, along the sides of which messages can be passed. Figure 6 shows an example of a Gabriel graph of a network. There exists an edge between two nodes (a, b) in a Gabriel graph if and only if there are no nodes in the disk with diameter ab. In Figure 6, we see that there is an edge in the green circle, since there are no nodes in that area. Conversely, we see no edge in the purple circle since there are nodes in that area. In Figure 7, we have the Gabriel graph of the network in Figure 6, with marked source and destination nodes, S and D. There is also a purple imaginary dashed line from the source to the destination in Figure 7. In the face routing algorithm, this line is used to determine the points at which a message would change faces on its way to the destination. To illustrate this point, we
Routing in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks
Figure 8. Face routing
Figure 9. Greedy mode in GFG routing
Figure 10. Face mode in GFG routing
Figure 11. Result of GFG routing
focus on Figure 8. Here, we see that the message follows the contours of each face until it hits the purple dashed line. At such points, it switches faces, and follows the contours of the next face. This procedure is repeated until the message reaches the destination. We can see from this illustration that face routing is not the most efficient algorithm, but nevertheless a useful one in cases where other greedy algorithms fail. We see such a case in the next section.
purple arrow. This node cannot forward the message to any node that is closer to the destination than itself. At this point, the greedy algorithm has failed, so face mode takes over since we know that face mode guarantees delivery of the message as long as there exists a path to the destination. The dashed line is drawn from that node to the destination, and face mode begins. It traverses the edges of the outer face until it finds a node that is closer to the destination than the node at which face mode began. When it finds such a node, as seen is Figure 10, we switch back to greedy mode and continue the routing process. Figure 11 shows the result of the GFG routing protocol, where the message was successfully delivered by the greedy phase in the last step. It was shown recently in (Frey & Stojmenovic, 2006) that face routing always recovers along the first traversed face if the Gabriel graph is used for planarization. However, in some cases, such as when a realistic physical layer is considered, other methods need to be applied to planarize the
GFG Routing Greedy Face Greedy (GFG) routing is a combination of greedy routing and face routing. The idea behind this algorithm is to proceed with the greedy algorithm until it becomes stuck, then to use the face mode to recover from such instances, and to again proceed with greedy mode. Figure 9 illustrates the GFG algorithm on a sample network. In greedy mode, node S forwards the message to the next node which is singled out by the
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graph, and face routing may have to traverse several faces. To guarantee delivery, GFG only needs the graph to be somehow planarized, independently of the method applied and the particular planar graph outcome.
Beaconless GFG In beaconless GFG, the nodes do not have knowledge of their neighbors. Therefore, at each step in forwarding a message, some local knowledge must be obtained. The node S currently holding the message would send out a single RTS packet as a single hop broadcast in which a bit would be added to signify whether the node wishes to send its message in greedy or face mode. In greedy mode, the neighboring node which is closest to the destination responds with a CTS packet after a time delay. The duration of the time delay is inversely proportional to the distance of that node to the destination. Therefore, the node that is closest to the destination transmits its CTS packets after a shorter time delay. This transmission cancels other CTS packets that are to be sent by other nodes. In face mode, an RTS packet is sent out, and neighbors that are closer to the node sending the RTS respond first with CTS packets. If a node A hears another closer neighbor B responding which is inside the circle with diameter AS, it indicates that AS is not in the Gabriel graph, and A then does not respond. Thus only the neighbors in Gabriel graph will respond. The Gabriel graph is then constructed from the received responses, and face routing continues. The details of this algorithm are found in (Chawla & Al, 2006).
ROUTING WITH A REALISTIC PHYSICAL LAYER The routing assumptions we have made so far state that two nodes are neighbors if they are at most distance R away from each other. If that condition is satisfied, then it was assumed until now that
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a message passed from two neighboring nodes had a 100% chance of arriving. Realistically, a message is received if the signal strength at the receiver is greater than a certain threshold, but signal strength has random variations. It is still true under realistic physical layer assumptions that neighbors can pass messages, but it is not always true that each message is received the first time it is sent. This is now a probabilistic function of distance. Figure 12 shows typical reception probabilities based on distance.
Route Discovery Process The route discovery process considering a realistic physical layer is not the same as when considering just the regular unit disk model. In a basic disk model of routing, one discovery message is enough for neighbors to correctly receive it and promptly respond. Therefore, neighbor and route discovery is relatively simple. In a realistic physical layer setting, messages requesting routes may not be received by other nodes, and might have to be rebroadcast. If only one discovery message is sent out, it might not be received by a node that is a relatively good connection to the intended destination. In this case, sub-optimal paths might be taken to the destination. On the contrary, it might also happen that a very weak connection to a distant node might be discovered by just one route discovery message. Under such circumstances, when actual messages try to use this link, they will fail most of the time. It is hence much better to send out multiple instances of route finding messages, and based on the available responses, construct a path that seems most reliable (Stojmenovic & Al, 2005). Route discovery packets are generally shorter than full message packets, and are received with a higher probability. Thus, more research is needed to design a route discovery process with low overhead, but which produces good routes in practice.
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Figure 12. Reception probability vs. distance
Position Based Routing with Realistic Physical Layer In any routing algorithm with a realistic physical layer, whether it be greedy or whether it has global information, the cost of passing a message from one node to the next needs to reflect the capability of efficient transmission. What we mean by this is that the cost of passing a message directly between two distant nodes is not the same as passing a message between two nodes that are relatively close to one another. Under realistic conditions, nodes have to assume that their message did not reach the intended receiver unless that receiver acknowledges receiving the message. In circumstances where neither the message reception nor the acknowledgement reception is certain, messages need to be retransmitted u times until an acknowledgement is received. Here, u is approximately 1/p(x), where p(x) is the packet reception probability for two nodes at distance
x. The cost of transmitting a message between two nodes can now be measured in expected hops, where a number of hops might be necessary to send a message to a neighboring node. This new cost function is called the expected hop count (EHC). Essentially, all of the connections, or edges, in a network become associated with weights. Greedy and other routing schemes now must consider the quality of links, and account for them by minimizing EHC(CA)/(|CD|-|AD|), where C and A are neighboring nodes (Kuruvila & Al, 2006). A localized routing algorithm with a realistic physical layer that guarantees delivery is described in (Nayak & Stojmenovic, 2006). It is based on the GFG algorithm where greedy mode is as described above, while face mode uses the same path as in the face routing scheme (Bose & Al, 2001)
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CONCLUSION We have seen here a number of approaches of routing in ad hoc and sensor networks. Certain routing methodologies are better suited for sensor networks, while others are better suited for ad hoc networks. There are a number of factors that influence the way routing algorithms should be designed and yet still even more that influence the way that the algorithms actually work in both scenarios. We have to take into consideration that most of this work is highly theoretical, and that a fully functioning sensor network that solves a particular problem is yet to be assembled. Routing algorithms that consider local information yet guarantee delivery of messages seem most promising for large scale networks. Power aware routing seems like a good cost function for wireless networks where power consumption is the main issue. QoS routing is a logical approach for high bandwidth demand applications such as on demand video. Each routing protocol that we have seen here has its application in certain scenarios. Further development of this field, and incorporation and testing of these algorithms may result in even more efficient and productive routing strategies.
REFERENCES Bachrach, J., & Taylor, C. (2005). Localization in Sensor Networks. Handbook of Sensor Networks. New York: Wiley-Interscience. Beijar, N. (2002). Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP), Licentiate course on Telecommunications Technology. Ad Hoc Networking. Bose, P., Morin, P., Stojmenovic, I., & Urrutia, J. (2001). Routing with guaranteed delivery in ad hoc wireless networks. ACM Wireless Networks, 7(6), 609–616. doi:10.1023/A:1012319418150
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Chawla, M., Goel, N., Kalaichelvan, K., Nayak, A., & Stojmenovic, I. (2006). Beaconless positionbased routing with guaranteed delivery for wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. International Journal of Sensor Networks, 1(1), 61–70. Contla, P., & Stojmenovic, M. (2003) Estimating Hop Counts in Position Based Routing Schemes for Ad Hoc Networks. Telecommunications Systems (Kluwer/Springer), 22(1-4), 109-118. Finn, G. G. (1987). Routing and addressing problems in large metropolitan-scale internetworks. ISI Research Report ISU/RR-87-180. Frey, H., & Stojmenovic, I. (2005). Geographic and energy aware routing in sensor networks. Handbook of Sensor Networks: Algorithms and Architectures. New York: Wiley. Frey, H., & Stojmenovic, I. (2006). On Delivery Guarantees of Face and Combined Greedy-Face Routing Algorithms in Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks. In Proceedings of the The Twelfth ACM Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking MOBICOM, Los Angeles. He, T., Stankovic, J., Lu, C., & Abdelzaher, T. (2005). A Spatiotemporal Communication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks, IEEE ICDCS, May 2003. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 16(10), 995–1006. doi:10.1109/TPDS.2005.116 Huang, C. Dai, F., & Wu, J. (2004). On-demand location-aided QoS routing in ad hoc networks. In Proc. Int. Conf. Parallel Processing ICPP, Montreal, 502–509. Intanagonwiwat, C., Govindan, R., & Estrin, D. (2000). Directed diffusion: a scalable and robust communication paradigm for sensor networks. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, Boston, MA, pp. 56-67.
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Jacquet, P., & Muhlethaler, P. Clausen, T., Laouiti, A., Qayyum, A., & Viennot, L. (2001). Optimized link state routing protocols for ad hoc networks. In Proc. IEEE Int. Multi-Topic Conf. INMIC, Lahore, Pakistan, pp. 62-68. Johnson, D. B., & Maltz, D. A. (1996). Dynamic source routing in ad hoc wireless networks. In Imielinski, T., & Korth, H. F. (Eds.), Mobile Computing (pp. 153–181). Kluwer. doi:10.1007/9780-585-29603-6_5 Jubin, J., & Tornow, J. D. (1987). The DARPA packet radio network protocols. Proceedings of the IEEE, 75(1), 21–32. doi:10.1109/ PROC.1987.13702 Kuruvila, J., Nayak, A., & Stojmenovic, I. (2006). Progress and location based localized power aware routing for ad hoc and sensor wireless networks. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 2(2), 147–159. doi:10.1080/15501320500259159 Mauve, M., Widmer, J., & Hartenstein, H. (2001). A Survey on Position-Based Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. IEEE Network, 15(6), 30–39. doi:10.1109/65.967595 McQuillan, J. M., Richer, I., & Rosen, E. C. (1980). The new routing algorithm for ARPANET. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 28(5), 711–719. doi:10.1109/TCOM.1980.1094721 Nayak, A., & Stojmenovic, M. (2006). Localized routing with guaranteed delivery and a realistic physical layer in wireless sensor networks. Computer Communications (Elsevier), 29(13-14), 2550–2555. doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2006.02.013 Perkins, C., & Royer, E. (2002). Ad hoc on demand distance vector (AODV) routing, Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, pp. 90-100.
Royer, E. M., & Toh, C. K. (1999). A Review of Current Routing Protocols for Ad Hoc Mobile Wireless Networks. IEEE Personal Communications, 6(2), 46–55. doi:10.1109/98.760423 Ruiz, P., & Stojmenovic, I. (2007). Cost-efficient multicast routing in ad hoc and sensor networks. In Handbook on Approximation Algorithms and Metaheuristics, Chapman & Hall/CRC (Teofilo Gonzalez, ed.), Vol. 30, No. 18, pp. 3746-3756. Stojmenovic, I. (2002). Location updates for efficient routing in wireless networks. In Handbook of Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing. New York: John Wiley & Sons. doi:10.1002/0471224561.ch21 Stojmenovic, I. (2004). Geocasting with guaranteed delivery in sensor networks. IEEE Wireless Communications, 11(6), 29–37. doi:10.1109/ MWC.2004.1368894 Stojmenovic, I. (2006). Localized network layer protocols in sensor networks based on optimizing cost over progress ratio and avoiding parameters. IEEE Network, 20(1), 21–27. doi:10.1109/ MNET.2006.1580915 Stojmenovic, I., & Lin, X. (2001). Power aware localized routing in ad hoc networks. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 12(10), 1023–1032. doi:10.1109/71.963415 Stojmenovic, I., Nayak, A., & Kuruvila, J. (2005). Design guidelines for routing protocols in ad hoc and sensor networks with a realistic physical layer. [Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks Series]. IEEE Communications Magazine, 43(3), 101–106. doi:10.1109/MCOM.2005.1404603 Stojmenovic, M. (2005). Swarm intelligence for routing in ad hoc wireless networks, Security and Routing in Wireless Networks (Y. Xiao, J. Li, and Yi Pan Yi, eds), Nova Science Publishers, pp. 163-184.
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Takagi, H., & Kleinrock, L. (1984). Optimal transmission ranges for randomly distributed packet radio terminals. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 32(3), 246–257. doi:10.1109/ TCOM.1984.1096061 Tseng, Y. C. Liao, W.H., & Wu, S.L. (2002). Mobile ad hoc networks and routing protocols. Handbook of Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Wu, J. (2002). Dominating set based routing in ad hoc wireless networks. Handbook of Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing (pp. 425–450). New York: John Wiley & Sons. Zorzi, M. (2004). A new contention-based MAC protocol for geographic forwarding in ad hoc and sensor networks. IEEE Int. Conf. on Communications (ICC), Paris, Vol. 6, pp. 3481–3485.
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Ad Hoc Network: is a self-configuring network of mobile devices connected by wireless links. Routing: Sending a packet from a source node to a destination node.
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Proactive Routing: In this framework, each node exchanges its routing table with all of its neighbors and updates its own routing table if better routes to some destinations are available based on the new data. The entries in the routing table for one node are the costs of sending messages from that node to all other nodes using the best know routes. Reactive Routing: This type of routing is analogous to tourists trying to find an obscure address in a new city: they get closer and closer to the destination by asking people along the way. Hybrid Routing: Proactive and reactive routing approaches can be combined into a single approach. Proactive routing is applied if the destination is nearby, while reactive routing is applied when it is far away. Topological Routing: Routing where nodes do not have positional information. Localized Routing: Routing where nodes have positional information about themselves, their neighbors, and the destination, and no information about the rest of the network. Backbone: Subset of nodes so that each node not in the subset, has a neighbor from the subset
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Chapter 3
Mobile Ad Hoc Networks:
Protocol Design and Implementation Crescenzio Gallo University of Foggia, Italy Michele Perilli University of Foggia, Italy Michelangelo De Bonis University of Foggia, Italy
ABSTRACT Mobile communication networks have become an integral part of our society, significantly enhancing communication capabilities. Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) extend this capability to any time/anywhere communication, providing connectivity without the need of an underlying infrastructure. The new coming realm of mobile ad hoc networks is first investigated, focusing on research problems related to the design and development of routing protocols, both from a formal and technical point of view. Then link stability in a high mobility environment is examined, and a route discovery mechanism is analyzed, together with a practical implementation of a routing protocol in ad hoc multi-rate environments which privileges link stability instead of traditional speed and minimum distance approaches.
INTRODUCTION Mobile ad hoc networks consist of interconnected mobile hosts with routing capabilities. Considerable work has been done in the development of routing protocols for ad hoc networks, starting from Internet protocols developed in the seventies. In recent years, the interest in ad hoc networks has grown due to the availability of wireless communication devices.
New research directions in theoretical computer science and in particular in protocol design make use of game-theory concepts and tools. From this “perspective”, protocols are viewed as games with players represented by network nodes which “play” (participate in) the game; each node (agent) has its own utility function, such as network flow (to be maximized) or energy consumption (to be minimized.) This approach thus is a natural pointof-view of a distributed computing architecture,
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch003 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
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the most interesting paradigm in actual computer science. This is especially true since the advent of wireless networks based on IEEE 802.11 Protocol (IEEE, 1999, 2003) (and in particular with the definition of the new draft “n”) where it is possible to deal with a variable-speed link going from 1 to about 300 Mbps (Fan, 2004). Besides, considering that mobile networks (see Mobile landscape, 2009) have the peculiarity of movement (which makes the link speed highly variable and therefore very unstable), stability of routes becomes a difficult undertaking. Furthermore, as for its intrinsic nature, the same protocol IEEE 802.11 introduces a considerable network overhead to control the transmission at the expense of throughput. So we think that choosing a stable routing – mainly considering stable links – is preferable to taking into account only the link speed and/or length.
BACKGROUND Distributed Computing Environments In a distributed computing environment, such as a network, different pieces of software interact by following one or more well-defined protocols. As an example, the request to access a Web page (which is routinely issued by a simple mouse click) is served by a number of such interactions that involve, besides the browser and the remote Web server hosting the page, also a number of intermediate “agents” (called routers) that make the request/response message delivery possible. There is a plethora of protocols, which are primarily classified according to the ISO/OSI layered model of networking (see Figure 1). At the one end of the stack we have the physical layer protocols, whose goal is to make possible the delivery of raw sequences of bits between directly connected computers. At the
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Figure 1. ISO/OSI networking layered model
other end there are the application protocols supporting well-known high-level services, such as the already mentioned Web service (through the http protocol.) The most fundamental protocols are probably those that fall under the general term of TCP/IP: these are the protocols upon which the Internet is based, since they implement the key functions of routing and congestion/flow control. One common assumption in the distributed computing and networking literature is that the agents participating in a protocol execution follow the guidelines specified by the protocol itself (say, a router that is expected to route a data packet closer to its destination point will always do so, unless it is temporarily out of service.) There are clearly a number of settings in which this assumption makes sense. An obvious case, for instance, is that of a private network owned by a single Corporation. In the field of mobile networks (the one which we are most interested in here) there are application settings in which the above assumption applies
Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Figure 2. Mobile ad hoc networks
as well. Consider, for instance, the case of sensor networks deployed with the goal of monitoring a given region. Another case is that of military networks. However, the assumption does not seem reasonable when, as in case of the Internet, the network is operated and used by different economic subjects, with possibly conflicting interests. Stated in other words, the assumption is not reasonable when the agents participating in the protocol may act selfishly with the aim at improving some personal utility. The obvious example here is a set of routers in a given domain that decide not to forward Internet traffic headed to domains belonging to competing organizations, or a military scenario where moving devices are not interested in routing enemy’s traffic. In the presence of selfish agents, the design of network protocols becomes a much harder task. Actually, this is not the whole story, as the influence of socio-economic factors calls for a completely new approach to the understanding and the design of network protocols. Quoting an influential author in the theoretical computer science community “the mathematical tools and insights most appropriate for understanding the Internet” and hence (mobile) networks “may come from a fusion of algorithmic ideas with concept and techniques
from Mathematical Economics and Game Theory.” (Papadimitriou, 2001) This new approach can be briefly synthesized as follows. First of all, the protocol and all the agents that possibly participate in the protocol define a game; this implies that each agent (player) has its own utility function. According to this scenario, a first goal is the understanding of the social cost of selfishness. In other words, given a measure of the overall performance of the protocol (this may be some global function, such as the average end-toend delay incurred by any message traveling the network), you may want to understand how bad, with respect to the ideal optimum performance, the network behaves due to the selfishness of some participants (as in Roughgarden & Tardos, 2000). A complementary goal is the design of protocols that aim at achieving some social objectives through the properties of rationality and truthfulness (Nisan & Ronen, 1999).
Mobile Ad Hoc Networks Mobile ad hoc networks are wireless networks characterized by the absence of any centralized coordination entity (see Figure 2). Each (mobile) device of the network, say a laptop or a PDA, can
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Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Figure 3. (a)Transmission range (b) Communication graph
be only directly connected to the devices within its transmitting range, called neighbor devices; as a consequence, traffic destined to (or originated from) a non neighbor device has to be routed through one or more intermediate devices (multihop traffic.) This characteristic represents a major difference from other wireless networks (such as cellular phone networks or wireless LAN) and is the source of a number of challenging problems.
Topology Control Given a transmitting range for each device (see Figure 3a), an ad hoc network can be modeled as a (directed) graph whose nodes are the devices and there is an edge from node u to node v if and only if v is within u’s transmitting range. Such graph is often termed as the communication graph (see Figure 3b). Topology control is the problem of establishing some desired connectivity property for the communication graph acting on the devices’ transmitting range. Depending on the application scenario and the traffic model, the required connectivity properties may vary; the most obvious is full-connectivity (i.e., the graph must be strongly connected), but in some cases you may require stronger properties, such as bi- or tri-connectivity. Also, for reasons that are related with the protocols at the other levels, it is often required that the graph
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be symmetric, i.e., there is an edge (u, v) if and only if there is the edge (v, u). Clearly, the goal of topology control is to achieve the desired connectivity properties using the minimum possible transmitting powers (hence ranges.) Because of the potential reduction in the nodes’ transmitting power, topology control may have positive effects on both network lifetime and channel capacity, since a reduced range implies less contention on the wireless medium. Unfortunately, determining the minimum energy consumption topology is a hard problem (Blough et al., 2002; Clementi et al., 1999). Practical (suboptimal) protocols for enforcing connectivity are presented in Blough et al. (2003), Liu & Li (2002), Ramanathan & Rosales-Hain (2000).
Routing Routing is the problem of deciding the path in the communication graph for traffic destined to non neighboring nodes. Logically, the routing level is above topology control, but is strictly related to that. Some authors do not consider a separate topology control level (in particular, no topology control is needed if all the nodes have the same, maximum, transmitting range) and the network topology is “determined” by the route discovery
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stage itself. In consideration of the power required to transmit a packet to distance d (which grows at least quadratically with d), different sourcedestination paths can be characterized by very different energy consumption, and an obvious goal of routing is to choose the most efficient among such paths.
Medium Access Control (MAC) The wireless channel is shared among network devices; clearly, while one such device u is transmitting, no other device within u’s transmitting range may initiate another transmission (this resembles a non cooperative game scenario). When different transmitting powers are used, e.g., as a consequence of decisions made at the topology control level, the request-to-send/clear-to-send (RTS/CTS) mechanism needs to be tuned in order to silence all the possibly conflicting nodes. For instance, suppose that u is not within v’s range while v is within u’s. Then a RTS control message sent by v cannot silence u, and the latter may erroneously assume that the channel is available for transmission (Jung & Vaidya, 2002). Note that the communication graph of the above example is non symmetric. One may erroneously think that an obvious solution to the problem is simply to drop the (u, v) arc when building the network topology. However, the example shows that logical connectivity is in general different from physical connectivity. Logical symmetry enforced at the topology control level can be useful in the routing discovery phase, but what counts at the MAC level is the physical connectivity. This is a point that has been often overlooked in the literature on topology control.
Energy Efficiency Energy efficiency is a concern at all levels of the protocol stack. In particular, topology control has the specific goal of determining a low consumption communication graph. As for routing, it is
generally acknowledged that energy efficiency considerations must complement more traditional analysis based on packet loss rate, routing message overhead, etc. (Johansson et al., 1999) The ultimate goal is to increase the lifetime of individual devices and that of the network as a whole. Several definitions of network lifetime have been proposed: according to the simplest definition a network is not more alive when the first node dies; another definition considers the size of the largest connected component, which must contain at least 90% of the nodes. Even other definitions are possible. As a result of the above mentioned problems, the ad hoc network technology is still in its infancy, and no large-scale implementation of ad hoc networks has been reported yet. However, in spite of the above mentioned difficulties, there is an already large body of works that deal with ad hoc networks. This is due to the fact that ad hoc networks represent the most promising paradigm for the foreseen ubiquitous computing. As an example scenario of ubiquitous computing, consider a (wired) Internet access service to mobile users that many providers have already installed in a number of “public” sites (for instance, several airports and shopping centers are already offering this service for free.) The possibility, offered by ad hoc technology, of multi-hop access, where a mobile device communicates with the base station(s) via other mobile devices, would have a positive impact on such aspects as increased coverage area of the service and, as a result of the adoption of shorter transmitting ranges, increased network capacity and lifetime.
Security Another important issue concerning networks is security. Wireless networks use radio waves (i.e. electromagnetic signals) leading to an irradiation phenomenon in the interested area: signals permitting network connections exceed
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Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Figure 4. Trusted relationships
needed area limits, reaching surrounding places in spite of a loss proportional to distance. This involuntary “broadcasting” makes it possible to gain access to network not only to authorized personnel, but also to everyone in the neighbors (as done in “warchalking” or Node Runner by hackers searching for accessible wireless network nodes, marking unprotected zones with conventional chalk signals.) Yet, same security problems are encountered in wireless ad hoc (multi–hop) networks: in fact, how sure can be a node about its outgoing traffic not being tampered with? From a pure cryptographic point of view, ad hoc network services do not imply “new” problems: authentication, confidentiality and integrity are issues already found in many other public communication networks. But in an ad hoc wireless network, trust becomes a key problem (Frodigh et al., 2000). Because the communication (radio) medium cannot be trusted (being intrinsically unprotected), cryptography is a mandatory choice, as well as relying on the cryptographic keys used. So, the basic idea is that of creating trusted key relationships without an external issuing Certification Authority (CA). In fact, a wireless ad hoc network
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comes out from spontaneously connecting and mobile nodes, and there is no warranty for a node to get trusted public keys from other nodes, nor they can exhibit third–party certificates. Nonetheless, if inter–node trust delegation is permitted, then nodes having already established trusted relationships may extend this privilege to other group members: let us see in detail how it works. The method is based upon a PKI (public key infrastructure) system. Suppose all nodes have connectivity with each other (e.g. through a reactive routing protocol), as shown in Figure 4. Initially, node N1 takes the role of server node in trust delegation procedure, and initiates the trusting process broadcasting a start message to the network. Every node receiving such a message forwards another one containing the trusted public keys set. N1 may so establish a trusted relationships map and identify them. In Figure 4 groups A, B and C participate to the trust chain. All nodes in B indirectly take part to the trust relationship with N1 (through node N3). Node N1 may so collect the signed keys received by group B through N3. Nodes in group C, instead, have not trusted relationships with node N1. However, a trusted relationship between nodes N7 (belonging
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Figure 5. Key exchange
to group C) and N1 can be “manually” created by means of trusted keys exchange. Node N1 can now collect the signed keys received from group C through node N7 (see Figure 5). Now, node N1 is ready to forward a message to the network containing all the collected signed keys. This procedure creates trusted relationships between nodes in groups A, B and C, and forms a new trusted group.
Protocol Design Issues As already pointed out, there is a growing interest in the computer science community to formulate new protocols (or, at the very least, to understand the behavior of currently used protocols) under the hypothesis of strategic behavior of the network nodes. In case of ad hoc networks, however, very few results are known, which almost always apply to routing. As an example of strategic behavior, a node may decide not to forward other nodes’ traffic, since during a message transmission a node consumes relatively more energy than during idle times. Of
course, if the majority of the nodes acts this way, no multi-hop traffic is possible. However, without cooperation, the ubiquitous computing scenario depicted in Figure 5 cannot occur since it is not economically feasible (Mas-Colell et al., 1995). The attention of a growing number of researchers is thus focusing on the design of protocols for ad hoc networks using the tools of game theory and mechanism design. Two properties are especially sought: rationality and truthfulness. According to the first, an agent is always motivated to participate in the game (i.e., the protocol), since its utility cannot decrease as a result of the participation. Truthfulness means that the best strategy (i.e., the one that maximizes its utility) for an agent is to behave according to the protocol. To this end, some forms of payment can be provided to motivate the players to act truthfully. Obviously, if the agents are rational and truthful, the protocol will achieve some target social goal (such as setting up power efficient end-to-end routes for all possible pairs of nodes.) Later on some practical ideas for the development of a routing protocol are discussed, upon which future research directions are based to make it rational and truthful.
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Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
As already mentioned, there are very few results dealing with the problem of strategic behavior in wireless ad hoc networks. At the routing level, protocols have been proposed for the establishment of routes among pairs of nodes using incentive payments to motivate intermediate nodes to act loyally (Buchegger & Le Boudec, 2002, 2002a, 2002b; Buttyan & Hubaux, 2000, 2001, 2003; Zhong et al., 2003). Anderegg & Eidenbenz (2003) introduced the first truthful routing protocol: it has however a number of shortcomings, being characterized by a high communication overhead and, more importantly, not enjoying the rationality property.
MANET ROUTING PROTOCOLS Introduction In wireline networks the task to establish the path that data packets must follow is carried out only by a limited group of devices called routers. In wireless ad hoc networks, instead, every host acts both as a router and a packet sender, so the classical routing protocols used by wireline networks are not applicable at all to MANETs. Existing routing protocols may be classified following three criteria: Based on the logical organization through which the protocol “describes” the network: from this point of view they may be divided in “Uniform” and “Non Uniform” routing protocols. In the first case, every node generates path control messages while answering (incoming) path control requests: all nodes have the same function. In the latter, instead, the way in which nodes generates and/or answers path control messages may be different for different group of nodes. Non Uniform protocols may be in turn logically subdivided into Neighbor Selection and Hierarchical: in the first case every node selects a neighbor node subset to calculate the path data packets must follow;
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in the second case, instead, nodes auto-organize in groups called clusters. For every cluster there exists a “controller” (master or cluster head) node, which has the task of coordinating the traffic inside it. It is obvious that Non Uniform protocols considerably reduce the signaling traffic vs. Uniform ones, thanks to the less number of nodes assigned to path calculations; but they pay an higher overhead due to the maintenance of complex high level structures. Based on the way routing information is obtained: from this point of view, protocols may be divided in Proactive (or Table-Driven), Reactive (or On-Demand) and Hybrid. The first continuously keep routing information updated through packet exchange at fixed time intervals: this allows immediate availability of routing at every request. The disadvantage is that Proactive algorithms produce signaling traffic also when no data packet is being transmitted; this may cause problems of excessive traffic load in the network, especially when nodes are rapidly moving, because the time interval between routing information transmissions has to be inversely proportional to the velocity with which nodes are moving, so as to get a correct routing. Examples of Proactive protocols are DSDV (DestinationSequenced Distance-Vector) and WRP (Wireless Routing Protocol.) In Reactive protocols a procedure is needed to establish the correct routing path only when packets are to be transmitted; in such a way signaling traffic is reduced, but with increasing delivery times (Johansson et al., 1999). Examples of Reactive protocols are AODV (Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector), DSR (Dynamic Source Routing), and TORA (Temporally Ordered Routing Algorithm.) finally, Hybrid protocols try to reach both previous protocols’ advantages, restricting Proactive algorithms application only to the nodes near the one doing data packet transmission. An example of Hybrid protocol is ZRP (Zone Routing Protocol.)
Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Based on how the routing path is created: from this point of view, protocols may split in Source Routing and Non Source Routing. In the first ones the sending node determines the complete path to the destination, registering it directly into the packet; so, intermediate nodes only retransmit packets to those addressed by the previously established path. In the latter, instead, the only routing information contained in data packets is that represented by the best neighbor node to which communication has to be forwarded; consequently, every node must be able to optimize routing decisions.
Traditional Reactive Routing: Route Request Process Wireless ad hoc networks are generally made of nodes such as notebooks, PDAs, mobile phones. The characteristic of ad hoc networks is to have frequent changes in topology. In addition, to keep track of topology, there is a significant commitment of resources and a considerable overhead. Protocols of reactive type were designed for these environments. The aim is not to keep track of network topology: let us see the process (Paoliello-Guimaraes & Cerda-Alabern, 2007). If a node needs to reach a destination, it starts a discovery process to find the path. This process begins through the transmission – by the source node – of broadcast messages of Route Request (RREQ) type, with TTL set to 1 (Zou, 2005; Paoliello-Guimaraes & Cerda-Alabern, 2007). This RREQ message will only pass through a single node because of its TTL set to 1. Each message has a sequence number, so that only the first message is considered, while its subsequent copies are discarded. When a node receives the first copy of a RREQ from a source node, it stores the address, thereby establishing a return path (reverse route.) When the first RREQ reaches the destination, a reply message of type Route Reply (RREP) is sent to the source through the return path. This type
of protocol is generally efficient for a single rate network; in a multi-rate network, however, what counts is not to minimize the number of jumps to reach a destination, but the total throughput on a given routing. An existing technique taking into account, instead of the number of hops, the throughput is the MTM (Medium Time Metric) (Awerbuch et al., 2007; Paoliello-Guimaraes & Cerda-Alabern, 2007). In this technique a cost inversely proportional to the speed of the link is established; hence, the minimum cost link is chosen. This chapter fits in this area. In fact, in choosing the path, it is not enough to consider only the cost of the link: its stability should also (and perhaps especially) be considered (Dube et al., 1997).
Protocol Issues The Problem of Routing Instability in High Mobility Networks Although existing routing techniques are of indisputable validity, as a result of lengthy trials conducted in wired networks, a problem which causes the performance loss in wireless ad hoc networks impacting on the route discovery processes is the same routing instability, given that we are dealing with high mobility networks. What is “routing instability”? Let us consider a node represented by a mobile phone transmitting while in movement and think how variable is the signal received from a surrounding node as the issuer node moves in a closed or open environment. The level of the received signal, changing constantly, causes a continuously variable ratio of Signal-to-Noise (S/N), altering the bit-rate and consequently the “cost” of the link. This variability would lead to a continuous instability of routing, causing a continuous search of the “best path”. This implies an overhead’s increase impacting greatly on the performance and throughput of the entire network.
39
Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
A technique that keeps track of link stability is now presented, so as to avoid too unstable links in the route discovery process.
Table 1. Node link transitions
Keeping Track of Routing (In)Stability Keeping memory of stability means understanding how stable are connections between nodes; the idea is to have a table maintaining information associated with each link on its state transitions. With the word “transition” you can consider the link’s moving from one transmission intensity (measured in dBm and equal to the signal/noise ratio) to another: Table 1 illustrates each node’s link associated with its number of transitions.
Stability Index and Threshold Let us now define what causes the increase in the number of transitions associated with the link. In order to record the link’s stability, omit all transitions lying within a defined tolerance, i.e. those which do not make a significant loss in link’s performance. The key idea is to record a transition whenever the link gets a difference between the new Ii and the previous Ii-1 sampled transmission intensity outside a predefined absolute percentage δI. So you keep track of a transition when: Ii − Ii − 1 > δI Ii − 1 In order to correctly keep track of transition frequency, it is advisable to sum the number of transitions of a link compared to a period of observation. For example, if N is the number of transitions in the time interval ∆T, the frequency F will be: F=
40
N ∆T
Node link
No. of transitions
L1
N1
L2
N2
L3
N3
...
...
Observation’s Time Interval To establish a statistical time interval ∆T is not simple. You can guess it to be inversely proportional to the average transmission intensity of the links and directly proportional to the number of nodes. Thus, given a network of N nodes, with links’ average intensity μI, you can say that: ∆T α
N µI
After this interval the various counters (column “Number of transitions” in Table 1) are zeroed. At the end, a maximum threshold α for the number of transitions in the time interval remains to be defined. Consider, for example, a time interval ∆T = 300 msec. and a possible maximum value Fmax for the transition frequency F of one transition every 15 msec. From that, you have α = ∆T · Fmax = 20. In a nutshell, if there are more than 20 transitions within an observation period of 300 msec. (i.e. F > Fmax) you will say that the network link is unstable. In order to practice an effective implementation of the mechanisms given above, one can follow two approaches. The first is to monitor the stability of the link, the second provides for the updating of the link stability table only after a route discovery request. Given the high overhead required by the first approach, it seems preferable to implement the second as better detailed later.
Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Influence of Best Path Choice in Route Discovery When deciding on the best path two alternative approaches called “Link Stability” and “Link Rate” are considered and described below in detail.
Coming back to the above sketched technique, the algorithm − among two links of equal speed − will choose (only under such conditions) the stablest. To define this stability the same considerations outlined in the previous technique can be done.
Link Stability
Protocol Design and Implementation
This technique, as the term shows, prefers link stability and, then, in the route choice to build the path it excludes a priori all links having a transition frequency F above a certain threshold. Returning to our example, if Fmax = 1/15 is the threshold corresponding to a transition every 15 milliseconds, all links having F > 1/15 will be excluded from the choice. Note that, albeit being true that the stablest link has to be chosen, a stable link could also be one with a zero (i.e. not working) signal intensity. Therefore a minimum threshold Imin should be set for the link intensity, below which the choice cannot be done even if the link is very stable. So, considering threshold values Fmax and Imin a network link is stable when I ≥ Imin and F ≤ Fmax.
From what said, the focus is here on the approach called “Link Stability”, in which the characteristic parameters for network monitoring are highlighted, i.e. the transition frequency of the received signal intensity (dBm) and the signal intensity itself. In the protocol design and implementation a crucial role is played by the link stability table. To optimize efficiency, the table will be updated at the beginning of every route discovery process and used in the same process to identify the route.
Link Rate In this technique stability becomes of secondary importance: the speed of the link is in any case to be preferred. So, when choosing routes for the construction of the best path, the stablest link will be chosen only within equal links’ cost (at an equal speed.) But what does equal speed mean? first, it should be noted that from a practical point of view having two links of the same speed may not correspond to reality, if not for a purely random case. Therefore two links are of “equal speed” if the difference in speed between them is no more than 20%. E.g., if the link L1 has a bit rate V1 = 100 Mbps you can say that a second link L2 has the same speed V2 if 80 Mbps ≤ V2 ≤ 120 Mbps.
The Routing Process Each node manages a routing-path table keeping track of all incoming and outgoing connections. The table contains, with respect to a classic routing table, not the mere next hop off an interface but the entire route (that is, all node addresses belonging to the route to destination) and a time-stamp field used to delete the obsolete routes not used for more than a threshold time limit, as shown below. Observing Figure 6, the upper layer (Application Layer) sends a route request to the network layer. The routing protocol (interior protocol) verifies if the destination address already exists in the device routing-path table. If the destination address doesn’t exist, the route discovery process is activated in order to enter the destination node address and its path in the routing-path table. If the destination address exists in the device routing-path table, the relative path (included in the routing-path table) will be used and updated by the real time-stamp value of the sender. In MANETs, the paths included in the routing-path table cannot be static since the network topology
41
Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Figure 6. WLAN communication of two nodes (source CNET)
changes very frequently; the responsibility of route availability is demanded to the upper layer (because there may be an expired timeout waiting for an acknowledgment.) It’s still the upper layer to decide whether to delete a route from the table, even if its time limit has not expired: this means that the upper layer will order a route discovery every time a packet nondelivery happens.
The Stable/Unstable Link Definition To define the (un)stable link during the operation of route discovery process, the node must collect n transmission intensity values Ii, i = 1..n (expressed in dBm) during a statistical time interval ∆T, updating the minimum value Is = mini {Ii} of the sampled data and a transition counter C every time the absolute relative difference between the two last observed values is outside the predefined percentage threshold δI. These values, at the end of ∆T, will be used to check that the received signal intensities Ii are higher than or equal to a minimum acceptable threshold Imin and if they overcome the percentage threshold δI not too often.
42
In the example of Table 2, five intensity signal measurements in dBm are sampled over an observation period ∆T = 300 msec and checked against a minimum intensity threshold Imin = −85 dBm and a percentage threshold δI = 20%; a maximum transition frequency Fmax = 1/15 is also assumed, from which a maximum acceptable transition counter α = ∆T · Fmax = 300 · 1/15 = 20. The transition counter C is increased every time the percentage ratio of the last two sampled dBm values overcomes the threshold. Note that the minimum intensity threshold is never violated (i.e. IS = −80 > Imin = −85). So, the link is stable because also the transition counter C = 3 does not overcome the maximum α = 20.
Route Discovery Packet Fields The route discovery packet contains the following fields: destination node address; sender node address; sender node time-stamp; hop-count (number of links, or nodes, passed through); number of stable links;
Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Table 2. Link stability table I i − I i −1 I i −1
Sample #
Intensity Ii (dBm)
Minimum value IS (dBm)
1
-50
-50
0%
0
2
-70
-70
40%
1
3
-80
-80
14%
1
4
-40
-80
50%
2
5
-70
-80
75%
3
pointer to a stack containing addresses of nodes traversed from the sender (bottom) to the recipient (top.)
Route Discovery Algorithm The route discovery process can be summarized as follows. Every node initiating a transmission activates a route discovery process. The transmitter node sends a packet including the destination address and the above mentioned fields. Every node receiving the packet checks if the destination address matches itself.
Matching The receiving node stores the return path, and the percentage of stable links over all links traversed. Later, after receiving the first packet, it waits for any other route discovery packet related to the pair sender-timestamp for a specified time ∆TB. If in this time another route discovery packet arrives, the node compares the percentage of stable links over all links passed through with the previous stored percentage. If it is higher, the new relative path and new percentage will be stored, otherwise the packet will be ignored. All other arriving route discovery packets will be treated the same manner until ∆TB expires. The recipient, once elected
% of oscillation =
Transition counter C
the best route among all considered in the above said interval: sends an ACK using the final reverse route. This acknowledgement will be uniquely associated with the route discovery packet transmitted by sender with its time-stamp included; inserts the reverse route (the winning route) in its routing-path table, binding it to a local time-stamp. Reverse-route will be used as long as the routing is valid, i.e. while the recipient is reachable.
No Matching The receiving node checks whether its address is in the stack of node addresses traversed: if yes, it drops the packet, since it is a broadcast route discovery packet previously handled by itself, so the broadcast storm effect will be excluded; if not, it sends a broadcast route discovery packet to the same destination address adding the node address from which the packet is coming from, plus a stable link counter increased by 1 (in case the receiving node has detected a stable link) and a counter storing all links traversed. Return to Step 3. It would be useful to conduct proper simulations to test the described algorithm and obtain significant values for the following parameters: statistical time interval ∆T;
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Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
number n of samples considered in the time interval; minimum threshold signal intensity Imin in dBm; percentage threshold of transmission swings δI ; allowed frequency swings limit Fmax to define a stable link; % of stable links over total traversed links for routing-path table; sender node (waiting for acknowledgement) time-out to initiate a new route discovery; time-out to declare an “old” route in the routing-path table; recipient node wait-time ∆TB to receive the route discovery.
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS Future research trends reflect the general goals introduced at the end of paragraph Distributed computing, which characterize the new scenario for the understanding and the design of open networks. First of all, it is useful to understand − with respect to some potential application scenarios for ad hoc networks − under which conditions the known “classical” protocols guarantee the achievement of the requested social goals. This kind of analysis has been done with respect to some Internet protocols, such as BGP routing (Markakis & Saberi, 2003.) Future work must possibly answer the following questions, among others. Under which scenario (i.e., traffic model, node payoff, etc.) can we avoid the formation of coalitions, that is, the formation of subsets of nodes that can increase their payoff by seceding from the rest of the network? In the negative case, can some relatively simple payment mechanisms help driving the network activity towards socially better outcomes? It is likely that, under many potential scenarios, the known protocols for ad hoc networks are not strategy proof (i.e., the rationality and truthfulness properties are not both satisfied.) Hence, the more
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ambitious research directed towards the design of new protocols resilient to strategic manipulations. As pointed out in paragraph Protocol design issues, there are already some proposals for the routing level, although no strategy proof protocol is known to date. However, it would be interesting to investigate strategic issues also at the topology control level as well as at the application level. The simple techniques exposed are suited to any type of mobile ad hoc network and any kind of speed, by the definition of the indicated parameters. Therefore, this methodology can probably be implemented in any type of network environment, even in networks with very high density of nodes, as wireless networks in delimited environments such as university campus, airports, shopping malls, etc. It would be useful to study how these techniques, when implemented, impact on the energy consumption of nodes. This study would not aim at finding an absolute value of absorbed energy, rather a percentage value relative to the generated network overhead.
REFERENCES Anderegg, L., & Eidenbenz, S. (2003). Ad hocVCG: a truthful and cost-efficient routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks with selfish agents. In Proceedings ACM Mobicom (pp. 245–259). Awerbuch, B., Holmer, D., & Rubens, H. (2007). The medium time metric: High throughput route selection in multirate ad hoc wireless networks. Mobile Networks and Applications, 253–266. Blough, D. M., Leoncini, M., Resta, G., & Santi, P. (2002). On the symmetric range assignment problem in wireless ad hoc networks. Proceedings IfiP Conference on Theoretical Computer Science (pp. 71–82).
Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Blough, D. M., Leoncini, M., Resta, G., & Santi, P. (2003). The k-neigh protocol for symmetric topology control in ad hoc networks. Proceedings ACM MobiHoc, 03, 141–152.
Dube, R., Rais, C., Wang, K., & Tripathi, S. (1997). Signal Stability-Based Adaptive Routing (SSA) for Ad Hoc Mobile Networks. IEEE Personal Communications, February (pp. 36–45).
Buchegger, S., & Le Boudec, J. (2002). Cooperative routing in mobile ad hoc networks: current efforts against malice and selfishness. Lecture Notes on Informatics, Mobile Internet Workshop, Informatik 2002, Dortmund, Germany.
Fan, Z. (2004). High throughput reactive routing in multi-rate ad hoc networks. Electronics Letters, 40(25), 1591–1592. doi:10.1049/el:20046622
Buchegger, S., & Le Boudec, J. (2002a). Nodes bearing grudges: towards routing security, fairness, and robustness in mobile ad hoc networks. Proceedings of the Tenth Euromicro Workshop on Parallel, Distributed and Network-based Processing (pp. 403–410). Buchegger, S., & Le Boudec, J. (2002b). Performance analysis of the CONfiDANT protocol: cooperation of nodes – fairness in dynamic ad hoc networks. Proceedings of ACM Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc). Buttyan, L., & Hubaux, J. (2000). Enforcing service availability in mobile ad hoc WANs. Proceedings of IEEE/ACM Workshop on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc). Buttyan, L., & Hubaux, J. (2001). Nuglets: a virtual currency to stimulate cooperation in selforganized ad hoc networks. Technical Report EPFL. DSC. Buttyan, L., & Hubaux, J. (2003). Stimulating cooperation in self-organizing mobile ad hoc networks. ACM/Kluwer. Mobile Networks and Applications, 8(5), doi:10.1023/A:1025146013151 Clementi, A. E. F., Penna, P., & Silvestri, R. (1999). Hardness results for the power range assignment problem in packet radio networks. Proceedings 2nd International Workshop on Approximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems (RANDOM/APPROX ’99). LNCS (1671) (pp. 197–208).
Frodigh, M., Johansson, P., & Larsson, P. (2000). Wireless ad hoc networking: the art of networking without a network. Ericsson Review, No. 4 (pp. 248–263). IEEE (1999). Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) specifications: Higher speed Physical Layer Extension in the 2.4 GHz Band. IEEE Supplement to Part 11, Rev. IEEE STD 802.11b. IEEE (2003). Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer specifications: Further Higher-Speed Physical Layer Extension into the 2.4 GHz Band. IEEE Draft Supplement to Part 11, Rev. IEEE STD 802.11g/D8.2. Johansson, P., Larsson, T., Hedman, N., Mielczarek, B., & Degermark, M. (1999). Scenariobased performance analysis of routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks. Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (pp. 195–206). Jung, E. S., & Vaidya, N. H. (2002). A power control MAC protocol for ad hoc networks- Proceedings ACM MobiCom 02 (pp. 36–47). Liu, L., & Li, B. (2002). Capacity-aware topology control in mobile ad hoc networks. Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (pp. 570–574). Markakis, E., & Saberi, A. (2003). On the core of the multicommodity flow game. Proceedings ACM Electronic Commerce conference.
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Mas-Colell, A., Whinston, M., & Green, J. (1995). Microeconomic theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Mobile landscape - Graz in real time. Retrieved July 16, 2009, from http://senseable.mit.edu/graz/ Nisan, N., & Ronen, A. (1999). Algorithmic mechanism design. Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing (pp. 129–141). Paoliello-Guimaraes, R., & Cerda-Alabern, L. (2007). Adaptive QoS reservation scheme for ad hoc networks. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 102–112. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-70969-5_8 Papadimitriou, C. H. (2001). Algorithms, games, and the Internet. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing (pp. 749–753). Ramanathan, R., & Rosales-Hain, R. (2000). Topology control of multihop wireless networks using transmit power adjustment. Proceedings - IEEE INFOCOM, 404–413. Roughgarden, T., & Tardos, E. (2000). How bad is selfish routing? Proceedings of the 41st Annual Symposium on the Foundations of Computer Science (pp. 93–102). Zhong, S., Yang, R., & Chen, J. (2003). Sprite. A simple, cheat-proof, credit-based system for mobile ad hoc networks. Proceedings of INFOCOM (pp. 1987–1997). Zou, S., Cheng, S., & Lin, Y. (2005). Multi-rate aware topology control in multi-hop ad hoc networks. Proceedings IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC’05) (pp. 2207–2212).
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Link: a hardware connection linking two or more electronic devices, normally using different
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types of cables each designed for a certain standard of data transmission. In addition to the electric cable is also possible to make a connection through fiber optics, radio waves and infrared (IrDA). Link Stability: transmission error rates (due to signal weakness or external environment factors such as white noise and wireless interference) can result in an unstable link. A link is stable if it has a low signal variation frequency with a minimum acceptable signal intensity. MANET: (Mobile Ad hoc NETwork): an independent system of mobile devices connected by ad hoc wireless links. All nodes in the system cooperate in order to correctly route packets in multihop forwarding mode. Due to the unpredictable mobility of nodes, the network topology may change constantly. Ad hoc networks are built and used as appropriate in extremely dynamic environments, not necessarily with the help of an already existing infrastructure, such as after natural disasters, military conflicts or during emergencies. Multi-Rate: a transmission system in which speed (rate) can vary from point to point. The use of different sampling rates within the same system offers several advantages such as lower computational complexity, adequate transmission rate and less memory capacity requirements. Network: a system that allows the sharing of information and resources (both hardware and software) among several devices (hosts), providing an information transport service to a user population distributed over a more or less extensive area. Computer networks generate potentially high volume traffic, unlike the telephone, efficiently managed through the technology of packet switching. Protocol: a set of rules formally described, defined in order to facilitate communication between one or more entities (network protocol, in case of remotely connected entities). All these rules are defined by specific standards (see ISO/ OSI), of many different types, depending on the entities and communication means involved.
Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Route Discovery: a request to find the best available route to the destination, when sending a message. Routing: in packet-switching networks, routing is the function of a device (router) that decides the best path along which to send a received packet. Each packet is forwarded from the source to a router, and from this to the next, until reaching the desired destination. The router often uses a table with destination network addresses to decide where to send each packet. The format
of this table and the way it is populated and possibly updated are specific to the different routing protocols adopted. Wireless: the term covers communication systems between electronic devices, which do not use cables (traditional cabled systems are called wired). Generally, the wireless uses radio waves at typically low power, but also infrared radiation or laser.
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Chapter 4
Convergence of Wireless Technologies in Consolidating E-Government Applications in Sub-Saharan Africa Bwalya Kelvin Joseph University of Johannesburg, South Africa Chris Rensleigh University of Johannesburg, South Africa Mandla Ndlovu Botswana Accountancy College, Botswana
ABSTRACT The convergence of wireless applications presents a greater hope for consolidating e-Government (ICTenabled or online government) applications even in resource-constrained countries such as those in Africa. This chapter presents an exploratory study that aims at discussing the extent as to how convergence of wireless technologies from different vendors promises to contribute to the consolidation of e-Government applications in Sub-Saharan-Africa (SSA). This is done by reviewing the different adoption stages of ICT and e-Government in SSA. It looks at challenges facing adoption of wireless technologies (GSMs, Wireless Internet Access, satellite transmission, etc.) across all the socio-economic value chains in SSA. The chapter looks at Botswana and South Africa as case studies by bringing out the different interventions that have been done in the realm of facilitating a conducive environment for the convergence of different wireless technologies. Out of the analysis of legal, regulatory, market and spectrum policies affecting the adoption of wireless communications in SSAs, the chapter draws out recommendations on how to consolidate wireless communications to be adopted in different socio-economic setups (e.g. e-government, e-Health, e-Banking, etc.). DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch004 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
Convergence of Wireless Technologies in Consolidating E-Government Applications in Sub-Saharan Africa
INTRODUCTION Wireless technologies (especially Internet-ready mobile phone technology) have seen higher adoption rates in the SSA region partly due to an escalation in the existence of Wireless Application Service Providers (WASPs) in SSA. This penetration has encouraged computing mobility which has encouraged spill-over applications to almost all the major sectors of the socio-economic hierarchy. One such e-application with great potential is the application of wireless technologies in the e-Government domain. Appropriate convergence of the different wireless technologies will enable increase access to information and public services in the framework of e-Government. As Africa’s technological landscape has kept growing exponentially, it is important to take advantage of this growth and promote e-Government which will hopefully bring about responsive, transparent and accountable management of national resources. Many literature sources that point to the fact that mobile technologies are growing at an alarming rate in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (TRASA report, 2009; Bwalya, 2009; Touré, 2006; Graham et al., 2006; ITU Report, 2008). Telecommunication service providers in the SSA region have made Internet access possible through a multitude of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), mobile phones etc. This means there is an increase in the number of people accessing the Internet making it possible for governments in SSA to consider implementing the e-Government governing model. In addition, e-Government can be a prerequisite to strategic initiatives avoiding rampant corruption and red-tape that characterizes most Africa’s government organs and thwarts effectiveness of public service delivery systems (Bwalya, 2009). This chapter defines E-Government as the use of ICTs to provide interactive public services linking then government, citizens and businesses. E-Government enables transparent government processes ushering in improved
service delivery/transactions which encourage participatory governance where citizens and businesses are accorded the chance to interact effectively with government departments, organs and line ministries. However, setting up a full-fledged e-Government interactive environment for SSA countries has been a huge challenge because of the different costs that come with its implementation. Before we look at the different challenges of e-Government implementation, let’s briefly look at the different benefits of using e-Government. The convergence of wireless technologies entails that different wireless ICT platforms cannot decode certain signals from a named source because of differences in IEEE standards. An example of this is that you can have a situation where WiFi (IEEE 802.11) can decode some signals from a source and WIMAX (IEEE 802.16) cannot decode the same signals that WiFi can. This may be because of protocol mismatch, different in synchronization and frequency bands. The figure below presents one context of convergence of wireless technologies where a WiFi device tries to join a WiMAX network and it can’t decode the signals because the base station which encodes the said signal uses WiMAX-OFDM. This convergence of wireless technologies can happen amongst many technologies such as GSM, CDMA, TDMA and iDEN or 1G, 2G, 2.5G, 3G to 4G in cellular phones. This convergence may also entail ability of mobile agents/devices to decode encoded signals on networks such as wireless LAN, MAN, sensor networks, RFID, and so forth. Since, generally, even ordinary individuals now have access to Internet-enabled mobile phones; implementation of e-Government on mobile platforms has much promise for Africa. This is compounded in the understanding that the universality in the signal decoding capabilities of different mobile devices is key to global access of e-Government information and public services in ubiquitous environments. This form
49
Convergence of Wireless Technologies in Consolidating E-Government Applications in Sub-Saharan Africa
Figure 1. Convergence of wireless technologies
of e-Government is called m-Government (discussed in the next section). In the SSA, a study by Maumbe and Owei (2006) investigated the adoption of m-Government in South Africa and outlined the different challenges that prevent the transition ofm e-Government to m-Government. Many authors (Bwalya, 2009; ) have outlined the different benefits (Mutula et al., 2010; Aladawi, Yousafzai, & Pallister, 2005; Warkentin, Gefen, Pavlou, & Rose, 2002) that come with the implementation of e-Government: a) the reduction in cost and the increase in the efficiency levels in public service delivery platforms brought about by appropriate coordination mechanisms amongst different government line ministries, organs and branches, b) growth in confidence levels in government processes as with the proper implementation of e-Government, there is resource accountability and responsiveness, c) reduction in corruption levels by public servants, d) facilitation of participatory democracy as citizens are involved in the different governance processes, e) ensures appropriate functioning for interaction mechanisms between the state, business and citizens, f) ensures openness and transparency of activities carried out by the public administration bodies for business and society, g) enables citizens to participate in the governance processes anywhere
50
and at anytime and h) encourages the interaction amongst different developmental partners (e.g. government, businesses and ordinary citizens) in exchanging governing ideas that could later transform the socio-economic status of a country. These different benefits are achieved after the major principles for e-Government applications have been appropriately applied. Reviewing the different countries that have successfully implemented e-Government reveals that the following principles should be employed for e-Government to succeed: a) platform for common national strategy formulation that would define goals, principles, objectives, indicators evaluating the process of e-Government implementation (implementation roadmap or e-Government strategy); b) synchronization of e-Government implementation process with administrative reforms and mainstreaming of e-Government systems at all levels of the government hierarchy e.g. at local government levels, c) creating tax and institutional mechanisms promoting demand for ICT and d) openness of e-Government introduction program development and accountability on its implementation. E-Government is looked at as a multi-dimensional entity which depends on availability of appropriate ICT infrastructure, convergence of
Convergence of Wireless Technologies in Consolidating E-Government Applications in Sub-Saharan Africa
ICT technologies, ICT skills of people, acceptable usability levels of web portals, cost of Internet access, cost of ICT devices, ICT culture, and so forth. For e-Government to be intermittent challenges to e-Government adoption can be attributed, principally, to lack of proper ICT infrastructures e.g. lack of fibre optical networks for broadband Internet communications. Very limited fixed networks are available in most parts of Africa (Bwalya, 2009). This further justifies the need to encourage provision of e-Government services through mobile platforms (m-Government). On another hand, in some places, telecommunications operators and other added-value service providers face a lot of difficulties in competing with stateowned competitor companies who enjoy wide monopolies and are fond of practices that do not encourage fair competition. This means it becomes difficult to have a mature telecommunications environment further negatively impacting on eGovernment efforts. All this is compounded by lack of proper monitoring, legal, regulatory and institutional frameworks in place. Other challenges have been lack of reliable power supply in many zones (mainly rural zones) where people can not charge the mobile terminals, or connect a computer to access to Internet, lack of the technological culture to understand the possibilities that these technologies could offer, and the difficulties to sure the investment return due the economical situation of great part of population, and so on. Another issue that confronts massive adoption of wireless technologies is the security issue. Enforcing of security inn wireless environment is more challenging and expensive that may be in convertible wired networks. The aforementioned challenges clearly justify the need to seek understanding of the premise of convergence of wireless technologies and its impact on e-Government. This further brings us to investigate the adoption trends of m-Government in the SSA and to explore on what interventions have been put in place to encourage the proliferation of e-Government in SSA. This chapter does
just that. To do this, the chapter surveys how the convergence of different wireless technologies, and other interventions, have aided in promoting adoption of e-Government in South Africa and Botswana. The next section discusses the background and gives a succinct motivation of this survey in a view to unearth the potential for the convergence of wireless technologies in promoting e-Government. It also discusses the pursuit of wireless e-Government applications in the pursuit of promoting the mobile governance model (m-Government), which is an emerging form of e-Government. Thereafter, the chapter presents findings on the exploratory studies of different convergence aspects of e-Government models in South Africa and Botswana. The next section after this gives the solutions and recommendations for advancing convergence of wireless technologies in facilitating m-Government applications in SSA and immediately thereafter, the future research directions are given. The chapter ends with a conclusion that gives a recap of what has been discussed in this chapter. Background In this plethora of technologies, convergence of telecommunications and wireless communications brings together voice telephony and more affordable wireless (mobile) services into more efficient interactive platforms. Broadband, a key requirement for productive Internet access, is still unavailable and/or unaffordable in most of the developing world (Lanwin, 2002; Bwalya, 2009; Pheko, 2009; Odinma, Oborkhale, Kah, 2007). These different convergence platforms aim for appropriate information dissemination and exchange of ideas, pulling people of different backgrounds out of different situations such as poverty and ameliorating their socio-economic standing. Convergence of wireless technologies offers great hope as a platform for e-Government applications in SSA as Africa has the highest growth rate of mobile technology adoption worldwide (Lanwin, 2002; Bwalya, 2009; Du Preez, 2009). As aforementioned, convergence of wireless technologies has brought about a re-
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Convergence of Wireless Technologies in Consolidating E-Government Applications in Sub-Saharan Africa
ality of the proliferation of a converged form of e-Government where public services and sharing of information is done through mobile platforms (mobile government: m-Government). Before we proceed further, let’s have a look at definitions and implications of m-Government. The extension of e-Government services to m-Government coupled with massive growth in mobile and wireless technologies has been acknowledged by several authors (Amitava and Agnimitra, 2005; Amailef and Jie; Karantjias, Papastergiou and Polemi, 2007). In a nutshell, m-Government is looked at as the use of mobile and wireless communication technology in government for service and information delivery to citizens and organizations (Fasanghari and Shamimi, 2009). It is thus in order to refer to m-Government as a complex business strategy for the efficient utilization of all wireless devices providing for instant availability of services and information for better benefits to users Amitava and Agnimitra, 2005). The ultimate goal of m-Government is to push forward the e-Government agenda by utilizing mobile and ubiquitous platforms. Further, Fasanghari and Shamimi (2009) quoting from other sources, mention that m-Government further facilitates service presentation to the citizens with access to the information and services in any time and any place made possible possible through connected wireless tools to the Internet. The paper by Amitava and Agnimitra (2005) suggested that the network architecture that provides m-Government comprises a hierarchical one with various wireless/wired access layers. These layers include the following: the cellulular, short range and the personal network layer (for detailed descriptions of these layers please refer to Amitava and Agnimitra, 2005). Amailef and Jie (2008) has recognized the fact that within the context of e-Government, mGovernment offer more access to information and services for citizens, businesses, and non-profit organizations through wireless communication networks and mobile devices and platforms
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such as pagers, PDAs, cellular phones, and their supporting systems. This has all been facilitated with the advent advances in Internet and wireless technologies which have brought forth mobility in e-applications. With intermittent growth of mobile technologies in Africa, m-Government presents a new way for enhancing interaction amongst citizens, businesses and government through mobile platforms towards improved content access, transparency, participations, and so forth. At the center of m-Government are issues of interoperability as different sets of mobile devises are involved in mobile e-transactions. This is where convergence of different wireless gadgets in heterogeneous computing environments is sought. In fact, interoperability requires easily identifiable and publishable mobile services as well as clear electronic and mobile interfaces for the establishment of secure and reliable connection points (Karantjias, Papastergiou and Polemi, 2007). Friske (2003) stated that convergence can be perceived through its division into two components: the technical and functional. The technical element refers to the ability of any infrastructure to transport any type of data whereas the functional aspect characterizes the means by which users are able to integrate the functions of computers, television, media and voice into a single device. However, it is worth mentioning that having lots of mobile devices does not enable m-Government. The true measure of convergence in this context is checking which applications are available, and how understandable, accessible and useful they are to the common citizen through the use of different mobile platforms. Different devices within different spectra can now do the same functions and are highly interoperable. Apart from the obvious uses of e-Government (access to government information from portals, downloading of public service forms, and so forth), some of the practical uses of m-Government have been in emergency response systems (Amailef and Jie, 2008). This suffices to mention that mGovernment can be used in many e-applications
Convergence of Wireless Technologies in Consolidating E-Government Applications in Sub-Saharan Africa
not limited to governance in the broader sense of the word. The convergence of different wireless ICT devices can encourage the growth of e-Government in the form of mobile government (m-Government). M-Government implementation involves the use of all wireless and mobile technology, services, applications and devices for improving benefits to the parties involved in e- Government including citizens, businesses and all government units (Kushchu, 2003). In most countries trying to implement e-Government, some of the early adopters of m-Government services include law enforcement, fire fighting, emergency medical services, education, health and transportation, immigration, border and coastal security and disaster response and management (Amine, 2005). M-Government implementations are emerging as one of the additional value-added features for the integrated and flexible data communication and exchange mechanism among government units, citizens and businesses. This can further be supported by the penetration of mobile technology and the relative low cost of entry into mobile connectivity, the convergence of wireless Internet and telecommunication networks, allowing information once only available on a computer to be received through mobile phones, and the shift towards higher data transfer rates and 3G services which promises to make more information available at faster speeds. M-Government offers a relatively lower cost of mobile phone technology versus Internet technology which has drastically lowered the entry barriers for ordinary individuals to participate in e-Government activities. This is because the use of WIMAX and WiFi technologies presents a real and low cost alternative to fixed networks to allow Internet access. This further presents an opportunity for WIMAX to combine with other current ICT infrastructures in these SSA countries where overreliance on high cost Internet connection through GSM/3G networks may not provide wide band for appropriate Internet connectivity.
Different wireless platforms have undergone transformations in order to be of much value to its customers and to be interoperable with other technologies, ICT devices and applications. Odinma et al. (2007) identifies broadband wireless networks as mainly comprising two types: fixed and mobile wireless. These can be Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi), which is an IEEE 802.11 standard and Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMax), which is an IEEE 802.16 standard. TRASA (2009) gives a historical overview of different transformations and convergence of different wireless technologies. The second generation (2G) wireless communication employed digital technologies such as the GSM, CDMAOne, iDEN, IS-136 and PDC. In between the 2G and Third Generation (3G) is the 2.5 Generation (2.5G) technologies, namely, GPRS which evolved from the GSM, EDGE which evolved from the GSM but it has higher speed than the GPRS and CDMA2000 1XRTT which evolved from CDMAOne. Al-Sherbaz (2008) acknowledges that WiFi, the widely deployed predecessor technology, is inexpensive and readily available with multiple vendors. But WiMAX offers better spectrum efficiency, data rate, and long-distance capability. Developing of the wireless environment can be facilitated by adopting the Fixed-Mobile Convergence (FMC) which is an analysis of the interworking between cellular networks and a variety of wireless technologies such as WLAN, WiMAX, RFID and UWB (Ghetie, 2008). Rossel (2006) states that the first understanding of mobile government is linked to the increase of space and time in accessing administration services to provide “mobile” with enhanced linkage and informational and transactional options or to develop new citizen opportunities linked with mobility issues and enhanced government services. This entails adapting government and administration services to be accessible in a ubiquitous manner, developing new options and services based on ubiquitous access and multi-channel possibilities, mobile services for mobile organizations, facilitat-
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Convergence of Wireless Technologies in Consolidating E-Government Applications in Sub-Saharan Africa
ing the mobile state, and mobile administration of administration agents or agencies. Even after having achieved full convergence of wireless technologies or having one of the fastest growth rates in mobile and wireless and convergence networks, there are still some challenges that need to be addressed to facilitate appropriate facilitation of e-Government systems. Lanwin (2002) identifies the different challenges that come with m-Government as a) Privacy and security, b) securing wireless e-mail, c) protection against loss of data, d) securing handheld access to the corporate network, e) deploy and manage security policies for many devices, f) accessibility, g) mobile authentications and h) mobile payments. Specifically, South Africa has faced a number of challenges in implementing m-Government as outlined by Maumbe and Owei (2006). Some of the challenges outlined include the following: a) islands of automation and weak inter-agency information sharing, b) inadequate integration of poor citizens into e-Government, c) slow pace in multi-lingual content development due to lack of content development specialists, d) lack of empirical research to evaluate impact of e-Government on citizen livelihoods, e) privacy and security concerns and f) lack of an empirically validated model for e-Government development in Africa. In the midst of these challenges, a new wave of mgovernment has descended on South Africa. Patel (2005) acknowledges that m-Government in South Africa is in its infancy. The current m-government landscape is one of isolated pilot projects and a handful of full-scale implementations. However, there is increasing interest and acknowledgement that m-government has potential value. South Africa, in conjunction with the ITU and other cooperating partners has launched a project on Rural Telecoms, ICT Services and Entrepreneurship Development. The objective of this project is threefold: 1) to encourage telecommunication operators to provide services in rural/remote areas with appropriate private investments; 2) to foster development of the content of the ICT services
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through private public sectors collaboration; and 3) to trigger provision of services to the general public by local entrepreneurs with support from microfinance institutions and other banks (ITU, 2008). Such kinds of interventions make sure that there is chance for wireless technologies to further converge. Since e-Government, and correspondingly, m-Government are new technologies that are just being introduced, it is important to understand technology adoption theories and principles. The following section presents a discussion of technology adoption especially e-Government and briefly mentions empirical findings of initiatives aimed at encouraging technology adoption. Fan and Zhang (2006) specifically proposed a conceptual model for government to government (G2G) information sharing in the context of the e-Government environment. This was done in the spirit of reducing bureaucracy that may be evident in many government agencies (Titah and Barki, 2006). With this model, information sharing amongst different government branches was made easier. After reviewing several technology acceptance models such as the Davis’ technology acceptance model (TAM), the Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) model, the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT), Fan and Zhang (2006) identified 8 common factors that have been utilized in different models such as: a) perceived benefits, b) perceived risks, c) top management support, d) IT support, e) costs, f) external pressures, g) critical mass, and h) championship. These 8 factors were accordingly incorporated into a conceptual e-Government adoption model that they proposed. Kamal and Themistocleous (2006) have also conducted a study to ascertain technology adoption in a complex environment such as a local government authority with hierarchical bureacratical structures with utter commitments to outmoded cultural values. Kamal and Themistocleous have identified a set of factors from literature that influence the uptake of e-Government. These are: knowledge of technology risks, IT capabilities,
Convergence of Wireless Technologies in Consolidating E-Government Applications in Sub-Saharan Africa
market knowledge on new technologies, managerial capabilities, project championships, external pressures, citizen’s data privacy and security, and Return on Investments (ROI). In their pursuit to better understand the factors that affect e-Government, Al-adawi et al (2005, P. 2), identified 4 questions they called ‘critical’ for the adoption and encapsulation of e-Government into the socio-economic setups. The following questions were identified and incorporated into a model for e-Government adoption: 1) How are intentions towards the use of e-government formed and to what extent are they related to the actual use of e-government? 2) To what extent the intentions to get information and to conduct transactions differ from each other? 3) What are the beliefs that influence citizens’ propensity to use e-government? How do these beliefs affect their intentions towards the use of e-government? 4) Are there any perception and adoption differences between segments of citizens on the basis of their technology readiness and demographic characteristics? Bélanger and Carter (2008) undertook a study which analyzed the impact of trust and risk perceptions on one’s willingness to use e-Government services and developed a model that include constructs supporting trust of the internet (TOI) and trust of government (TOG). Their study utilized data from a citizen survey that indicated that the disposition to trust positively affects TOI and TOG. Several authors (e.g. Warkentin, Gefen, Pavlou, & Rose, 2002; Bwalya, 2009; Mutula et al., 2010, and so forth) have pointed out that data security, accessibility and perceived confidentiality influence individual adoption of e-Government adoption to a greater extent. The factors affecting e-Government can be divided into individual and organizational. Titah and Barki (2006) have suggested that apart from organizational factors, individual beliefs of citizens have a significant influence on the adoption of e-Government services. With strong reference to Davis’ technology acceptance model of 1989, it is known that individual beliefs such as
perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU) have been considered as the dominant beliefs that affect the intention to adopt or use the technology in a business to consumer (B2C) model (Warkentin, Gefen, Pavlou, & Rose, 2002). Heeks and Santos (2009; p. 3) unleashed a study where they gave some perspectives on the adoption of public sector innovations – “one that understands adoption as based on the behavior of individual actors set within a contextual framework”. Their motivation came from the fact that e-Government faces low usage rates and stated that there exists huge gaps between designers and adopters. In their study, they employed case research to study the practice-based problem of e-Government where it was thought that the experiences of the actors are important and the context of action is critical (also cited in Benbasat et al., 1987). Their study identified different factors that affect the role of the designers (as principals) and adopters (as agents). Colesca (2009) identifies five different steps to making e-Government happen and these are: Develop a vision; conduct an e-readiness assessment; identify realistic goals; get the bureaucracy to buy-in and develop a change management strategy; and build public-private partnerships. These e-Government constructs are accordingly applicable to m-Government. There is utmost need for the potential of wireless technologies to be explored as Africa’s mobile and wireless access to Internet resources keeps on growing. Boyinbode & Akinyede (2008) notes that Africa’s mobile usage has a growth rate of about 904% from 2000 to 2008 and that has made the continent the fastest growing region in terms of mobile usage. With the promising ubiquitous world, convergence of wireless technologies is very vital in that it will encourage a varying degree of e-applications to be performed on any wireless device such as mobile phone or PDA. Thus, for complete convergence to take place, as put by Javaid (2006), there are two fundamental issues: the first being the need for seamless
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Convergence of Wireless Technologies in Consolidating E-Government Applications in Sub-Saharan Africa
interoperability and pervasive integration of heterogeneous networks in order to offer a variety of diverse services in an always best connected environment, and the second being the need for optimized network resource management, which has been obstructed by the conventional wireless and cellular networks. For the case of Africa, the convergence of wireless technologies depends on the local context. The next section looks at the two cases of the role on wireless convergence as applied in the e-Government platform for Botswana and South Africa.
CASE STUDIES A) Botswana Botswana is an emerging ICT-usage-powerhouse in SSA looking at the number of interventions being implemented towards the same. Recent endeavors have seen it implement massive projects such as the construction of the Kgalagadi optical fibre network (for broadband Internet), full liberalizations of the telecommunications sector, establishment of sound ICT sector regulatory and institutional frameworks, dedicated ICT policy, setting up of Botswana IT hub, etc. In an environment like this, convergence of wireless technologies may be a reality looking at the already established appropriate ICT environment. Gillwald & Stork (2008) did a study where Botswana emerged as one of the countries with a higher fixed-line penetration with 11 to 18% of households having a working fixed-line phone. By the end of March 2002, there were 278 000 mobile subscribers as compared to 142 000 fixed line subscribers (Monnane, 2003). Compared to other countries, Botswana’s mobile penetration (teledensity) has been remarkable, from nothing in 1997 to 14.24 in 2002, only second to South Africa in the region. In terms of mobile lines as percentage of total lines, Botswana is behind Lesotho, South Africa and Tanzania only.
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With the introduction of cheap Taiwan or Chinese phones on the local telecommunications market, acquiring a handset is no longer a far-fetched dream for Botswana citizens (Batswana). Telecom operators e.g. Mascom and Orange Botswana have started offering Internet accessibility on mobile phones. People in the rural communities can also access Internet as mobile signal coverage is being improved courtesy of appropriate ICT infrastructure being erected even in rural areas as guided by the rural telecommunications initiative. This initiative has brought modern telecommunications, including Internet access, for the first time to 147 villages. When fully implemented, the project will ensure that more than 50% of Batswana living in the remote areas of the country will be provided with basic telecommunications services. Further the Botswana Telecommunications Corporation (BTC) has launched VSAT technology that, it hopes, will play a role in bringing services to remote areas through the use of satellite and overcome limitations placed on traditional services by vast distances and difficult terrain. It is anticipated that Botswana’s telecommunication industry is likely to record growth in the year 2009 placing it ahead of the telecoms market of South Africa and Nigeria in terms of teledensity. This forecast follows the launch of BeMobile by the BTC in 2008. A lot is being done in the telecoms sector to encourage the growth of this sector. Lewin et al. (2004) has noted that a Convergence Bill is under preparation to update the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Debate has focused on how far this Bill can include provisions that would extend liberalization. Another intiative has been the putting in place of the Cybercrime Bill, originally published in the Government Gazette in October 2007 (Mesa, 2007). The Convergence Bill encourages further liberalizations and convergence of both wireless and fixed technologies. Pheko (2009) notes that the effect of this has been the following: a) licensing of beMobile (the BTC mobile arm), b) rollout of product packages and price offerings to attract
Convergence of Wireless Technologies in Consolidating E-Government Applications in Sub-Saharan Africa
more customers by Orange Botswana and Mascom Wireless, c) establishment of own International Voice Gateways by Mascom Wireless and Orange Botswana, d) introduction of VoIP services by PTOs and VANS; e) upgrading of Public Land Mobile networks to introduce 3G services, f) rollout of WiMax services to some urban areas and g) increase in the number of registered VANS. In order to promote adoption and acceptance of wireless technologies in the pursuit of accessing public services and exchange of information, the government and different other stakeholders such as non-governmental-organizations have put in place the following interventions: a) The Botswana Telecommunication Authority (BTA) has been formed with the mandate to coordinate the ICT and telecommunications landscape in Botswana. This includes allowing mobile Internet service providers to compete fairly with other competitors, put in place legal and institutional frameworks, and so forth. b) About 4% of the country’s GDP has been directly allocated to interventions to encourage use of ICT (Mutula et al., 2010). These interventions include, among others. Carrying out massive awareness campaigns to the general citizenry on the benefits of taking full advantage of ICT platforms to access government services and participate in decision-making. Out of these awareness campaigns, many people now understand the importance of computers in their lives. c) Subsidizing computer and mobile gadgets importation into Botswana and reduction in duty paid for computer accessories into Botswana. d) Government’s implementation of Thuto.net project which aims to encourage the penetration of computers and mobile technologies (especially mobile phones) into Botswana’s schools, universities and companies. Out of this initiative, all the universities and schools
have computers and computer awareness courses have been introduced in all the high countries throughout the country. e) The BTA is also mandated to protect the consumer from exposure to harmful digital content by making sure that acceptable security is implemented to digital resources by the producers. f) The government further sponsors radio talks on how public services can be accessed through ICTs (e-Government). g) Establishment of an e/m-Government task force that has been mandated to make sure that the implementation of the e-Government agenda is realized. This e-Government task force is house within the Ministry of Transport and Communication under the Department of Information Technology. The task force has so far come up with a draft e-Government strategy for Botswana, and is currently working hand-in-hand with BTA to make sure m-Government applications are made a reality. To this end, a government portal has been designed and is in its pilot phase awaiting commissioning after considerable feedback from the users has been obtained. Feedback from the users of the limited mGovernment initiatives that are in place suggest that although many people are not directly aware of e-Government interventions and benefits, there are positive signs that m-Government will thrive in Botswana. Given these scenarios, it is fair to state that there is a lot of potential of m-Government in Botswana (Mutula et al., 2010) as more and more people are having access to mobile phones which can further be used as platforms for Internet access.
B) South Africa South Africa has done some significant strides in taking advantage of what convergence of wireless
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Convergence of Wireless Technologies in Consolidating E-Government Applications in Sub-Saharan Africa
technologies has to offer by putting in place a committed team for m-Government implementation (Maumbe & Owei, 2006, 2009). Although there are challenges that have been met, use of the m-Government model in South Africa presents a promising platform for citizen-governmentbusiness interactions. Between 2003 and 2008, there has been over 40% increase in the number of mobile subscribers per 100 population in South Africa (Du Preez, 2009). The phenomenal growth in mobile subscribers has been coupled by a rapid increase in commercial and other e-applications that take advantage of the ubiquitous nature of mobile phones. With its relatively well developed and diverse infrastructure, South Africa is taking a regional lead role in the convergence of ICTs with the media and entertainment sector, promising reductions in telecoms costs and better availability of information and services. Billions of dollars are being invested into IP-based Next Generation Networks that are capable of delivering converged services more efficiently (Research report, 2009). Telecom carriers and ISPs are moving into delivering audio and video content over their networks, while in turn the traditional electronic media carriers are discovering the potential of their infrastructure for telecommunications service delivery. Mobile TV licenses are expected to be issued in 2009. Graham et al. (2003) further stipulates that the South African telecommunications market is poised at a critical point in its development. On the wireless side, South Africa has witnessed a spectacular growth in users, far beyond original expectations. Despite high levels of income inequality, approximately 37 percent of South Africans now have a mobile phone (Du Preez, 2009). Whether through WAP-based applications on mobile phones or via cellular data cards connected to laptop computers, wireless technology will increase Internet usage, and will drive some convergence with the fixed Internet world (Graham et al., 2003). South Africa presents a case
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where convergence is taking place not only in the wireless medium, but blended convergence between broadcast services and mobile communications. This type of convergence is opening way for the implementation of mobile and digital TVs which will impact the way people consume digital content. South Africa’s public sector institutions largely engage with mobile solutions in an isolated and case-specific manner. There is no comprehensive strategy guiding choices around the use of mobile technology. Trying to take advantage of what the convergence of wireless networks has to offer, South Africa has put in place a well-defined vision for e/m-Government. The m-Government strategy, being driven by the South African Center of Excellence on m-Government, will ensure that the public sector can use its spending power and leverage far more strategically, and hence extend access to services whilst the Centre of Excellence will provide a meeting place where government and the private sector can, on a on-going basis, identify and test m-Government solutions as well as to look at how these solutions can positively contribute to improved operations and public service delivery (Maumbe, 2006; Du Preez, 2009). Maumbe and Owei (2006) analyzed the status of m-Government implementation in South Africa. In their study, they carried out an information audit on what endeavors have been done in the line of m-Government implementation, identified the different factors that affect e-Government implementation and developed a model for m-Government implementation in South Africa (please refer to Maumbe and Owei, 2006). Another study by Du Preez (2009) assessed the m-Government readiness in the province of Western Cape. That study found out that countrywide, there are more than 30 million mobile services subscribers and that Western Cape presents a case where mobile technology is going to be used as a major e-Government platform in future. Many of the participants in that survey gave positive experiences with regards to mobile technolo-
Convergence of Wireless Technologies in Consolidating E-Government Applications in Sub-Saharan Africa
gies and m-Government. The major limitation identified in both studies by Maumbe /Owei and Du Preez point to limitation of public services that can be decoded on mobile platforms. Most public services require a considerable bandwidth to access major applications.
SOLUTIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS Botswana and South Africa show a case where different stakeholders are committed to advancing the wireless technologies for e-Government applications. This is evidenced by different institutional and regulatory frameworks that have been set up starting from the liberalization of the telecommunications sector. Both countries have put in place an enabling environment for wireless technologies proliferation. However this being the case, there are several challenges that are faced in both cases concerning benefits for the transformation of convergence of wireless technologies into tangible socio-economic values and e-applications such as m-Government. These challenges may be different from context-to-context. The following list shows the general recommendations that should be considered when implementing m-Government applications. Looking at the cases presented above, it is evident that there are still some issues that need to be addressed before m-Government were to be a success or mean anything tangible to the ordinary citizens of both South Africa and Botswana. Whilst major interventions are being implemented in both countries, it is evident that not much is being done in regards to protecting the user in these m-Government environments. a) Encourage and nurture m-Government applications by further encouraging awareness campaigns on mass scales to educate people on the benefits of engaging in m-Government applications. These campaigns should be
directed at highlighting both the pros and cons of engaging in m-government. The strategy taken by Botswana in strengthening radio e-Government campaigns should be encouraged. In fact, these campaigns can even be replicated to being promoted using simple text messages pointing citizens to where e-Government services can be found on the cyber space. b) Engage more of Wireless Application Service Providers (WASPs) in pushing the convergence of wireless technologies agenda. This is because some government entities may not have the technical staff and capacity to support the required programming and deployment to link applications to multiple types of wireless devices. For both South Africa and Botswana, this can be done through the regulatory bodies. The regulatory body in respective countries can engage the telecommunications service providers to provide their services through common wireless platforms and technologies. Further, these bodies can also help in encouraging the understanding and adoption of m-Government by ordinary citizens. c) There should be efficient liberalization platforms that encourage competition in the telecoms sector. The more service providers, the more competition and the better the services provided become. This may have a direct impact on m-Government. These liberalization plans should also be spearheaded by the regulatory bodies (BTA for the case of Botswana). d) The future importance of m-Government in the service delivery agenda will be dependent on resolving a range of range of technical and non-technical issues and challenges which are context-specific as identified in this chapter. This should be done through closer cooperation between industry and government, and not forgetting ordinary citizens. It is to be mentioned that a consul-
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Convergence of Wireless Technologies in Consolidating E-Government Applications in Sub-Saharan Africa
tative process in drawing any strategy for m-Government is desired. Both South Africa and Botswana have put in place teams driving the e/m-Government agenda and drawing up / refining existing e/m-Government roadmap. It is desired that an e-Government agenda done in a participatory manner is appropriate because it can install a sense of ownership into the people and thus they can easily buy in into the technology. e) It is not only with putting in place institutional and regulatory frameworks that can make m-Government to thrive. Developing a better understanding of the legal and institutional issues that facilitate m-Government deployment and addressing weaknesses that may exist is also equally important. Such kind of initiatives should be embedded into e-Government strategy. f) There is a need to introduce an appropriate partnership between network operators, citizens, public sector institutions, and application developers (locally bred) that would allow for the identification of possibilities of the technology for government where this is cost effective and efficient. Once these set of recommendations are considered, coupled with other technical and managerial issues that may affect a local context have been taken care of, it is anticipated that the likelihood that the convergence of wireless technologies will bring forth m-Government success is high.
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS The convergence of wireless technologies to presenting a better platform for m-Government summons a number of issues and challenges if full value of these technologies were to be retrieved. Wireless technologies are still under an active developmental phase so technical issues such as security and data rates are still in their infancy
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of investigations. Most commonly used security platforms such as the wireless intrusion prevention system (WIPS) which monitors the radio spectrum for the presence of unauthorized access points (intrusion detection) and can automatically take countermeasures (intrusion prevention) may have several limitation concerns. Also, devices such as WIPS may not be cheaply accessible to ensure secure application in wireless technologies which would further install confidence on the part of m-Government participants. Further research directions should concentrate on finding cheap, yet appropriate security platforms that can be used in wireless technologies especially as these technologies converge. Also, it is imperative that future research directions be devoted towards finding optimal solutions to the following problems: a) The lack of technical professionals to develop applications, services and contents to increase the ROI for operators with great value solutions adapted to the need of population in the different countries. b) The computer penetration in home and companies and the need of develop an Internet culture to prepare the future citizens which demands new technologies like basic tools for the Society. This entails finding appropriate technology adoption models commensurate to the African technological setup. Other research directions include finding a synergy on how different evolving technologies can be made to perform common e-applications in the name of convergence. These may include further investigating both technical and managerial issues from an African perspective of convergence between broadcasting and telecommunications, fixed and wireless networks/services and voice and data networks. Further work is also needed to accommodate the different stakeholders that utilize e/m-Government applications in the same harmonized e-applications environment.
Convergence of Wireless Technologies in Consolidating E-Government Applications in Sub-Saharan Africa
CONCLUSION Evolving technologies and the convergence of different wireless technologies present a chance that ICT can be used as a public good in facilitating e-applications such as e-Government. Wireless technologies have provided a platform which offers mobility to different ICT devices. As these devices’ capacity to access the Internet is enhanced, and as this presents one of the fastest growing technologies adopted in Africa, the mGovernment model has been made possible. The opportunity provided by m-Government comes with many issues and challenges according to the context where this e-Government model is being implemented. This chapter has looked at what convergence of wireless technologies is and what it entails. Botswana and South Africa have been presented as case studies to ascertain the status of encapsulation of wireless technologies into the m-Government model. The chapter has shown that convergence of wireless technologies is occurring at different levels within the vertical value stack, from networking technology, services and applications to end-user mobile terminals. The chapter has also outlined the different interventions and actions that are necessary for effective convergence to take place and which should be focused on if different stakeholders such as the industry players and regulators are to benefit from the full range of opportunities that are and will be presented by the wireless industry now and in the future. The general consensus of this chapter is that since mobile and wireless technologies have shown great signs of growth in Africa, it is vital that the benefits (such as enhancing e-applications on heterogeneous mobile ICT devices) that this has to offer are taken advantage of. For this to be realized, the different challenges that come with convergence of different wireless technologies, especially for the case of Africa, have to be taken care of. M-Government (which is a replica of eGovernment but with the case where the ICTs used
are not static and where e-Government is mostly accessed using mobile technologies allowing a great deal of ubiquity and pervasiveness) has shown a lot of potential in Africa given the higher costs in acquiring standard computers and higher costs for Internet access which are prerequisites for e-Government facilitation. M-Government, however, offers a flexible and affordable platform as people can access the Internet for interaction with different m-Government stakeholders anytime and anywhere. For the case of typical e-Government, Internet access is only possible on static computers and the Internet provided by ISPs may be expensive than one provided by telecom companies on mobile devices. Now that m-government is inevitable, extending activities to wireless devices and networks will enable SSA countries to be more proactive in their operations and services by providing realtime and up-to-date information to the officials on the move and by offering citizens a broader selection of choices of interactions.
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Karantjias, A., Papastergiou, S., & Polemi, D. (2007). Innovative, Secure and Interoperable E/MGovernmental Invoicing. Paper presented at the 18th International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC 2007). IEEE. 1-5, 3-7. Retrieved September 13, 2007 from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp. jsp?arnumber=4394010&isnumber=4393983 Kushchu, I., & Kuscu, M. (2003). M-Government: facing the inevitable. Paper presented at the 3rd European Conference on e-Government, Frank Bannister and Dan Remenyi (eds.), Trinity College, Dublin Ireland. Lanwin, B. (2002). A Project of Info Dev and The Center for Democracy & Technology. The E-government handbook for developing countries. Retrieved November 15, 2009, from http://www. cdt.org/egov/handbook/2002-11-14egovhandbook.pdf Lewin, D., Hall, R., & Milne, C. (2004). Further liberalization of Botswana’s telecommunications industry. Consultation document for interested parties issued by the Botswana Telecommunications Authority. Retrieved August 8, 2009, from www. bta.org.bw/pubs/Liberalisation%20Consult2.pdf Maumbe, B. M., & Owei, V. (2006). Bringing M-government to South African Citizens: Policy Framework. Cape Town: Delivery Challenges and Opportunities. MESA IT&T Newsleter, fourth quarter. (2007). Retrieved August 17, 2009, from http://www. linexlegal.com/content.php? Monnane, M. (2003). Botswana Telecommunications Services. Southern African Trade Research Network (SATRN). Working Paper No. 3 Mutula, S., Grand, B., Zulu, S., & Sebina, P. (2010). Towards an information society in Botswana: ICT4D Country Report. Research paper presented at Thetha Sangonet ICT4D Forum.4
Odinma, A. C., Oborkhale, L. I., & Kah, M. O. (2007). The Trends in Broadband Wireless Networks Technologies. The Pacific Journal of Science and Technology, 8(1). Retrieved June 25, 2009, from http://www.akamaiuniversity.us/PJST.htm. Patel, I., & White, G. (2005). M-government: South African Approaches and Experiences. Paper presented at EURO mGOV 2005, Brighton, UK, 313-323. Pheko, T. G. (2009). Botswana Telecommunications Authority. Botswana Country Report to CRASA. Retrieved August 15, 2009, from www. crasa.org/.../reports/.../Botswana%20Report%20 2009%20Presentation.pdf ITU Report. (2008). Report on the World Summit on the Information society stocktaking. Research Report. (2009). South Africa – Convergence – VoIP, NGN & Digital Media. Retrieved June 22, 2009, from http://www.researchandmarkets. com/reports/1031255/ Rossel, P., Finger, M., & Misuraca, G. (2006). Mobile” e-Government Options: Between Technologydriven and Usercentric. The Electronic [from www. ejeg.com]. Journal of E-Government, 4(2), 79–86. Retrieved September 20, 2009. Titah, R., & Barki, H. (2006). E-Government adoption and acceptance: A literature review. International Journal of Electronic Government Research, 2(3), 23–57. Touré, H. I. (2006). Competitiveness and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Africa International Telecommunication Union. Retrieved July 12, 2009, from www.weforum.org/ pdf/gcr/africa/1.5.pdf TRASA report. (2009). Report on the Next Generation Wireless Technologies Conference for Southern Africa. Retrieved August 4, 2009, from www.crasa.org/.../Next%20Generation%20Conference%20Report.pdf
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Wangpipatwong, S., Chutimaskul, W., & Papasratorn, B. (2008). Understanding Citizen’s Continuance Intention to Use e-Government Website: a Composite View of Technology Acceptance Model and Computer Self-Efficacy” The Electronic [from www.ejeg.com]. Journal of E-Government, 6(1), 55–64. Retrieved September 7, 2009. Warkentin, M., Gefen, D., Pavlou, P., & Rose, G. (2002). Encouraging citizen adoption of E-Government by building trust. Electronic Markets, 12(3), 157–162. doi:10.1080/101967802320245929
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Wireless Technologies: Technologies that enable communication to be facilitated through wave propagation with no use of a wired medium. The wave propagation may happen between a stationery base station or access node and a mobile platform such as a PDA. Convergence: Is the approach toward a definite value, a definite point, a common view or opinion, or toward a fixed or equilibrium state. Convergence of wireless technologies means different wireless technologies such as WiFi and WIMAX can decode encoded signals from the same base station either WiFi or WIMAX technology.
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Electronic Government (e-Government): Is a platform through which the government interacts with its citizens and business entities for the sake of exchange of information, public services and participatory democracy through the use of ICT platforms. Mobile Government (m-Government): This is replica version of e-Government, only that in this mode, mobile ICT devices are used for interactions and access to the Internet may be facilitated anywhere and anytime (ubiquitous nature of e-Government). ICT: This acronym stands for information and communications infrastructure. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA): Is a geographical term used to describe the area of the African continent which lies south of the Sahara or those African countries which are fully or partially located south of the Sahara. This excludes North African countries because they are considered as belonging to the Arab world. ICT Infrastructure: It encompasses all the devices, networks, protocols and procedures that are employed in the telecoms or information technology fields to foster interaction amongst different stakeholders. Regulatory Framework: A set of guidelines that coordinates the following of set principles, e.g. market competition and liberalization, ethic, etc.
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Chapter 5
Process Innovation with Ambient Intelligence (AmI) Technologies in Manufacturing SMEs:
Absorptive Capacity Limitations Kathryn J. Hayes University of Western Sydney, Australia Ross Chapman Deakin University Melbourne, Australia
ABSTRACT This chapter considers the potential for absorptive capacity limitations to prevent SME manufacturers benefiting from the implementation of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) technologies. The chapter also examines the role of intermediary organisations in alleviating these absorptive capacity constraints. In order to understand the context of the research, a review of the role of SMEs in the Australian manufacturing industry, plus the impacts of government innovation policy and absorptive capacity constraints in SMEs in Australia is provided. Advances in the development of ICT industry standards, and the proliferation of software and support for the Windows/Intel platform have brought technology to SMEs without the need for bespoke development. The results from the joint European and Australian AmI-4-SME projects suggest that SMEs can successfully use “external research sub-units” in the form of industry networks, research organisations and technology providers to offset internal absorptive capacity limitations.
INTRODUCTION Through case study research, this chapter discusses some of the challenges Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the manufacturing sector face DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch005
in identifying and adopting Ambient Intelligence (AmI) technologies to improve their operations. Ambient Intelligence technologies are also known as Pervasive computing or Ubiquitous computing, and we include the descriptions of these terms when we refer to AmI technologies. Our study includes case studies of three Australian
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Process Innovation with Ambient Intelligence (AmI) Technologies in Manufacturing SMEs
SMEs and a comparison with similar application requirements in a German SME manufacturer. The outcomes of the study are likely to be applicable to small firms in many nations. The 1980s and 90s saw the operations of many large manufacturers revolutionized by the introduction of process and technological innovations (Gunasekaran & Yusuf, 2002). While there have been uneven adoption rates in smaller businesses and across different nations (Chong & Pervan, 2007; Oyelaran-Oyeyinka & Lal, 2006) it is clear that technological innovations such as Electronic Data Interchange, Business Process Re-engineering, Enterprise Resource Planning and robotic automation, amongst others, have played key roles in increasing manufacturing productivity. At the beginning of the twenty first century this transformation continues. Ambient Intelligence (AmI) technologies are being positioned as the next performance and productivity enhancing purchase for manufacturers, and a potential means for manufacturers in developed nations to counter perceived threats from lower labour cost countries (Kuehnle, 2007). Thus, the key objectives of this chapter are to consider potential applications of AmI technologies in Australian SME manufacturers, and discuss the opportunities and shared challenges faced by such firms in adopting these technologies. In doing this we will compare different levels of absorptive capacity and technological readiness in Australian firms, seeking possible reasons for similarities and differences in their comparative technology adoption processes. The chapter also examines the role of intermediary organisations in alleviating these absorptive capacity constraints. Our overarching research question is: “Can external intermediaries overcome absorptive capacity limitations in SMEs seeking process innovation through the application of AmI technologies?” In order to understand the issues surrounding this problem, a brief overview of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) adoption in
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manufacturing and an explanation of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) technologies are provided in the following section. Following that we examine the role of SMEs in the Australian manufacturing industry plus the impacts of government innovation policy and absorptive capacity constraints in SMEs in Australia.
BACKGROUND ICT Adoption for Business Performance Improvement Brown and Bessant (2003) described the global manufacturing environment developing in this new century as an increasingly competitive landscape, characterised by on-going demands for improved flexibility, delivery speed and innovation. A frequently occurring element in manufacturers’ responses to these pressures is the implementation of increasingly sophisticated ICTs. The benefits of incorporating ICTs on business responsiveness have been identified as: more effective and more efficient information flows; assisting in value-adding improvements for current processes; greater access to efficiency enhancing innovations throughout the value chain (Australian Productivity Commission, 2004); and the ability to access world markets through e-commerce (Kinder, 2002). ICT adoption has been considered worth the risk, given the competitive pressures placed on business to keep pace with technology. For example, in Australia, the uptake of ICTs has increased dramatically towards the later part of the 90’s and into the 21st Century. Reports show that in 199394, 50 per cent of firms used computers with 30 per cent having internet access; by 2000-01 these figures had increased to 85 per cent and 70 per cent respectively (Australian Productivity Commission, 2004). Recent figures (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2009) reveal that almost all Austra-
Process Innovation with Ambient Intelligence (AmI) Technologies in Manufacturing SMEs
lian SMEs use ICTs, and 96% of them access the internet through a broadband connection. One of the latest developments in the application of ICTs to business improvement is that of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) technologies. The objective of AmI is to broaden and improve the interaction between human beings and digital technology through the use of ubiquitous computing devices. By using a wider range of simplified interaction devices, ensuring more effective communication between devices (particularly via wireless networks) and embedding technology into the work environment, AmI provides increased efficiency, more intuitive interaction with technology (Campos, Pina, & Neves-Silva, 2006) and improved value and productivity (Maurtua, Perez, Susperregi, Tubio, & Ibarguren, 2006).
Ambient Intelligence (AmI) Technologies Existing literature (Kopacsi, Kovacs, Anufriev, & Michelini, 2007; Li, Feng, Zhou, & Shi, 2009; Maurtua et al., 2006; Vasilakos, 2008; Weber, 2003) points to the co-existence of three features in any AmI technology: ubiquitous computing power, ubiquitous communication and adaptive, human-centric interfaces. Regardless of arguments about terminology and definitions (the terms “pervasive computing” and “ubiquitous computing” are in common use in the US, while “ambient intelligence” is favoured in the EU), these technologies are already commonplace. The beep signalling the automatic deduction of a road toll from your account as your car passes under a toll gate is one aspect of an AmI technology known as Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID). RFID technology is having an impact in many industries, some of which are not normally associated with high levels of ICT adoption. For example, during 2006, in NSW alone (one of the 7 states and territories within mainland Australia), more than 1.2 million head of cattle were automatically
tracked from farm to saleyard to abattoir as their RFID ear tags passed through RFID sensor gates (NSW Farmers Association, 2007). In addition to increasing process speed and efficiency, AmI technologies have the potential to provide tracking of employee and customer activity. While concerns about the impact of technology upon power relations in the workplace are not new (Zuboff, 1988), the characteristics of AmI technologies present new challenges to worker privacy, informed consent and dignity. AmI technologies may, intentionally or not, dramatically increase employee surveillance and monitor consumer activity over the entire product life cycle. This potential and the very nature of ‘ubiquitous computing’ raises important ethical issues. Proposals to use RFID tags to track sufferers of Alzheimer’s disease (Caprio, 2005) and children provide examples of the ethical dilemmas AmI technologies can present. While these issues are beyond the scope of this chapter, we suggest Cochran et al (2007) for a review of ethical challenges associated with RFID. Social factors associated with the introduction and implementation of AmI technologies may be exacerbated in small and medium businesses. In addition to concerns shared with corporate workers, such as disquiet about their personal data potentially being sold to marketing groups and anxiety about the security of the information gathered, members of small businesses are particularly prone to AmI’s ability to ‘break the boundaries of work and home through their pervasiveness and ‘always on’ nature’ (Ellis, 2004, p.8). While some profit-maximising small business owners welcomed this blurring of work and home boundaries, others did not, preferring to keep work and family spheres separate. Ellis cautions that in order to overcome existing negative preconceptions of AmI technologies, users must feel they control the devices and the data they produce, and be able to override them and cope with systems failure. In particular, AmI needs to be presented
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Process Innovation with Ambient Intelligence (AmI) Technologies in Manufacturing SMEs
as “smarter” than existing ICTs and able to correct some of the problems associated with traditional forms of ICT support. In short, Ellis (2004, p. 9) asserts, “AmI needs to be associated with undoing some of the more problematic aspects of existing ICTs, to be accepted and not resisted as a more invasive, insidious and controlling form of what already exists.” Much of the promise of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) technologies rests upon connecting increasingly sophisticated and powerful sensors with existing computing facilities. McCullough (2001) identified the need to expand our thinking beyond the notion of filling environments with physical objects when considering Ambient Intelligence technologies. There is no longer such a thing as “empty space” when sensors and processing power combine to produce an environment that is “aware” of the locations, actions and information needs of humans. Clearly, the extent of existing Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure in an organisation will impact AmI technology implementations, providing either a “clean slate” from which to start or the opportunity to integrate new AmI capabilities with existing ICT systems and processes. In much the same way as the advent of mobile phones in China and India provided an opportunity for people unable to afford a landline, to access telephonic services, AmI technologies may prove a way for SME organisations to “leap frog” a stage of ICT implementation, and move directly to wireless and similar AmI technologies. Many other applications of AmI technologies are appearing as technologists extend the concept into areas such as “wearable technology” (clothing that incorporates sensors and interface devices), more intuitive home space designs, shopping assistance and the creation of seamless interfaces between work, home and leisure activities. While many of these applications currently seem unrelated to improving business productivity, it is clear that the applications for business can only grow as the technologies become more sophisticated and
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less expensive. As Rao and Zimmerman (2005, p.3) state “there is a gap in the scholarly discussion addressing the business issues related to it, and the role of pervasive computing in driving business innovation”. It is in this context that the following case studies of four small-to-medium (SME) manufacturers - three Australian and one German firm – have been undertaken. In each firm, critical process analysis was carried out to examine possible process weaknesses and existing ICT systems, and recommendations were made concerning a selection of AmI technologies with the potential to boost business performance.
AMBIENT INTELLIGENCE TECHNOLOGY IN MANUFACTURING This section considers the applicability of several emerging AmI technologies to three SME manufacturers in New South Wales, Australia and compares the situation within these SMEs with one German SME manufacturer undertaking a similar technological adoption. In doing this the section also addresses questions about the preparedness of SMEs, particularly concerning their absorptive capacity limitations and how these may be overcome. Later sections also consider the potential impact of Ambient Technologies on the employees of the organisations studied. AmI technology is much more than RFID inventory control systems. Wireless, multi-modal services and speech recognition systems have the potential to increase manufacturing flexibility by supporting dynamic reconfiguration of process and assembly lines, and improving human-machine interfaces to reduce process times (Maurtua et al., 2006). Also, maintenance and distribution processes may be improved by linking common mobile wireless devices, such as mobile phones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) or even pagers to production alert systems (Stokic, Kirchhoff, & Sundmaeker, 2006).
Process Innovation with Ambient Intelligence (AmI) Technologies in Manufacturing SMEs
Small and Medium Manufacturers in Australia Organisations with between 20 and 199 workers employ 56% of Australia’s workforce (Wiesner, McDonald, & Banham, 2007). The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) defines a small business as employing less than 20 people, and a medium enterprise as employing between 20 and 200 employees (ABS, 2001). The most recent ABS figures available (2007) for Australia indicate that there are around 47,000 manufacturing firms employing between 1 and 20 people, around 10,000 employing between 20 and 200 people, and only 873 employing over 200 people. In turnover terms, around 29,000 manufacturing firms reported annual turnover between $500,000 and $10 million, while only 3,300 firms reported turnover of $10 million or above. It is clear that the bulk of manufacturing in Australia occurs in small-to medium firms. While SME firms employ the majority of manufacturing workers their expenditure on R&D notably lags behind that of large manufacturers. Within the manufacturing industry companies with more than 200 employees were responsible for 73% of total industry R&D expenditure, with only 27% being contributed by the SME sector (ABS, 2007). However, in their exploration of the cost and impact of logistics technologies in US manufacturing firms Germain, Droge & Daugherty (1994) found that for manufacturing managers wanting to innovate with logistics technology, organisational size provides an advantage that transcends both the cost and nature of the technology. These authors confirmed the established view in 1994; that organisational size was positively correlated with technology adoption, as found in many previous studies. This link between manufacturing organisation size and increased ability to extract benefit from technological innovations may provide some explanation for the fact that while Australia’s manufacturing output has quadrupled since the mid 1950s, the Australian Government
Productivity Commission (2003) states that overall, it has not grown at the same rate as the service sector. The Productivity Commission also describes Australia’s manufacturing sector as having “missed out on the productivity surge” of the mid 1990s while noting signs of improved manufacturing productivity in 2002 and 2003. The widespread availability of off-the-shelf ICT systems has probably meant that a great many more SMEs are adopting ICTs today than in 1994, however the limited resources of many such firms (both financial and human) almost certainly mean reduced awareness and limited capacity to exploit newer technologies commonly appearing in larger manufacturers. Given the significance of SMEs in Australian employment and the perceived need to increase manufacturing productivity, examination of the potential improvements available through the systemic application of AmI technology to SME manufacturers forms an important topic for research and government policy.
Absorptive Capacity This chapter applies the concept of absorptive capacity to manufacturing SMEs. We argue that SMEs can benefit from AmI technologies, using specialised intermediary organisations to overcome the “absorptive capacity” limitations evident in many SME organisations. Cohen and Levinthal (1990) proposed that internal Research & Development activities serve two purposes: to generate innovations, and to provide the ability to absorb relevant knowledge appearing in the external environment. The absorptive capacity of a firm is comprised of these two categories of activity. Their foundational paper conceptualised absorptive capacity in the context of large U.S. manufacturers, as evidenced by their survey of identifiable “R&D lab managers” (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990, p. 142) and their discussion of “communication inefficiencies” between business units. But what of small- and medium-sized manufacturers? Does the notion of absorptive
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Process Innovation with Ambient Intelligence (AmI) Technologies in Manufacturing SMEs
capacity have relevance to SMEs outside narrow, industry-segment specific technologies? If so, can external intermediaries assist SMEs to overcome absorptive capacity limitations regarding ambient technological innovations? The preparedness of SMEs to adopt and benefit from the mobile capabilities of AmI technologies is likely to be linked to their ability to overcome the limited absorptive capabilities associated with their small size. However, it is possible for SMEs to successfully deploy AmI technologies. Clear evidence of the benefits produced by a range of AmI technologies have been observed by the researchers at Costa Logistics’ distribution centre in Western Sydney. Costa Logistics specializes in the distribution of fresh fruit and vegetables, and achieves astounding levels of accuracy and throughput: staff average zero to three errors per million cartons picked in the warehouse, the daily inventory turn ratio is 100% and over A$2 billion of product is handled annually on behalf of their clients (Game-Lopata, 2008). The company was a SME when it started to use wrist-mounted bar-code scanners coupled with wireless communications. These successfully implemented AmI technologies are key factor that have enabled Costa Logistics rapid expansion to well over 200 employees in late 2009.
Innovation, Manufacturers, SMEs and Government Policy Several previous studies (Cutler, 2008; Philips, 1997) have concluded that innovative Australian firms of all sizes (both manufacturing and servicebased) tend to be more successful in terms of sales growth and market share than non-innovating firms. In addition, the impact of innovation is considered to be cumulative (Chapman, Toner, Sloan, Caddy, & Turpin, 2008) with some level of innovative behaviour or research and development being required to equip a firm to identify, assess and adopt technologies. The innovativeness and absorptive capacity of SMEs is a matter of concern for other nations besides Australia. For example,
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in its 2008 budget, the UK government signalled its intention to set a goal for innovative SMEs to win 30% of its ₤150 billion public procurement spending (Kable’s Government Computing, 2008), equating to $98 billion (AUD) of incentives to encourage UK SMEs to innovate. While similar incentives are yet to appear in Australia, there are clear signs of government interest in the ability of SMEs to innovate (Department of Innovation Industry Science and Research, 2008). There is a growing body of work in the innovation literature on the limited absorptive capacity of SMEs to identify relevant innovations, understand and appreciate possible applications, and finally adapt and implement innovation in their organisations (Beckett, 2008; Liao, Welsch, & Stoica, 2003; Muscio, 2008). Many points concerning “constraining factors” and “implementation challenges” support the notion that SMEs can experience organisational absorptive capacity limitations. Beckett (2008) identifies knowledge and resource constraints that impede the ability of SMEs to develop absorptive capacity, but also provides an example of how absorptive capacity is built when the outlays of time and money required match the SME’s available resources. While the benefits of AmI technologies are already accruing in large organisations (Angeles, 2005) if manufacturing SMEs are to benefit from AmI technologies, one challenge requiring attention will be that of their limited absorptive capacity for technological innovations. Our research considered the possibility of external intermediaries being used to facilitate SME manufacturers’ assessment of the application of AmI technologies for process innovation, thus overcoming, at least partially, the problems of limited absorptive capacity within the partner SMEs.
Process Innovation with Ambient Intelligence (AmI) Technologies in Manufacturing SMEs
Figure 1. Representation of the Three Phase AmI-4-SME Methodology (Source (Kirchhoff et al., 2006))
METHODOLOGY AND DATA COLLECTION Case research has been used to review and compare the operations of the three NSW manufacturing SMEs, identify process weak points (in partnership with the SME executive managers) and suggest potential Ambient Intelligence Technologies to assist each organisation. The data has been gathered as part of an Australian government funded International Science Linkages Project, which in turn was part of a larger EuropeanAustralian project on Ambient Intelligence in manufacturing - Ambient Intelligence Technology for Systemic Innovation in Manufacturing SMEs (AmI-4-SMEs). The European component of the AmI-4-SMEs project involved six SMEs, three research partners and three Information and Communications Technology (ICT) providers located in Germany, Ireland, Spain and Poland. The Australian AmI-4-SMEs project consists of six SMEs, two research partners (University of Melbourne and University of Western Sydney) and two ICT providers. Six SMEs were selected from those responding to a request for expressions of interest in participating in the study. Using the Australian Bureau of Statistics metrics (2001), all are classified as small-to-medium sized manufacturers and all are privately owned.
The EU AmI-4-SMEs project aimed to design and develop a coordinated approach for process innovation using, ICT “building blocks” and a software platform to support the improvement of manufacturing processes in SMEs. These improvements were achieved by re-engineering processes and introducing appropriate ICT tools. The method used to analyse and re-engineer business processes is an extension of the COST-WORTH methodology (ATB Institute for Applied Systems Technology Bremen GmbH, 2004) and has three main phases: Analysis and Conception, Selection and Specification, and finally Implementation. Due to lower levels of government funding support, the Australian Ami-4-SMEs project performed only the Analysis and Conception, and the initial aspects of the Specification and Design phase but not the Implementation phase. The links between these phases are shown in Figure 1. The Analysis and Conception phase produces an implementation plan for the proposed AmI solution. Analyses of each SME’s business processes and bottlenecks form the majority of this phase which concludes with presentation of a business re-engineering recommendation and a Return on Investment Analysis (Kirchhoff, Stokic, & Sundmaeker, 2006). One challenge of working with SMEs is to gather sufficient information without intruding
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Process Innovation with Ambient Intelligence (AmI) Technologies in Manufacturing SMEs
to the extent that the organisation is adversely affected. On-site interviews and observation, questionnaires (these were developed as a part of the precursor COSTWORTH project, see Nousala, Ifandoudas, Terziovski and Chapman, 2008), video recordings, a visit to a company (Costa Logistics) already using wireless, wearable and voice (Chang & Heng, 2006) technologies in its warehouse, and joint creation of process maps where they did not previously exist were used to collect data and minimise disruption to the SMEs. Interview and questionnaire data were used to select important, problematic processes for each SME. On-site observations and video recordings were analysed to create “as-is” maps of the process selected for improvement, and identify key limitations of each process. AmI technologies with potential to improve the selected business process were selected and the likely costs and benefits reviewed with the SME executive managers. A strength (and simultaneous limitation) of this approach, is that the time spent at each SME site is not extended or intensive. However, given the objectives of the analysis and conception phase of the AmI-4-SMEs project, and the need to minimise disruption to the operation of the manufacturing businesses, the methods are appropriate.
RESULTS
have been used for the SME companies. Ranked in order from low to higher technological capability they were: SwivelMould – a plastics manufacturer specialising in rotational moulding work; BottleTop – manufacturer of plastic packaging closures; and TechMakers – a contract electronics component manufacturer. As described in the methodology section, due to lower funding levels, the Australian AmI-4SMEs project did not fully incorporate the latter two phases of the project (see Figure 1), instead leaving it to the individual companies to complete these steps. The European project funding also included direct funding support for the SME partners, which was not provided under the Australian government support funds. However, the Analysis and Conception phase, and the initial aspects of the Specification & Selection phase, included a detailed initial assessment of each SME, identified possible AmI solutions and produced a rough implementation plan for the proposed AmI solution. Analyses of each SME’s business processes and bottlenecks formed the majority of this phase, and these were conducted on-site at the three NSW SMEs. Tables 1 and 2 present summary information and key issues related to technology adoption for each of the three SMEs from New South Wales, Australia.
Overview of the Three Australian SMEs
Similarities and Differences between the Three Australian SME Manufacturers
The three Sydney-based SMEs represent a wide range of existing ICT complexity and skill, from “craft-work” factories to highly sophisticated manufacturers of technology. Although the organisations were not intentionally recruited to represent a typology of low, moderate and highly integrated ICT installations and skill sets, they do display these characteristics and it is useful to consider how AmI technology capabilities may be added to each of these settings. Pseudonyms
Scalability issues related to specialised equipment appeared as a limitation shared by the three Australian SMEs. Production could not rapidly increase without the purchase of more machinery, and in the case of TechMakers, difficulty in arranging for the rapid importation of components also limited their growth. Key differences observed in the three Australian SMEs relate to the proportion of standardised production and organisational culture. Eighty per
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Process Innovation with Ambient Intelligence (AmI) Technologies in Manufacturing SMEs
Table 1. Company summary BottleTop Turnover: $30M Employees 97 Profit: moving from break-even to profitable trading in 2008/09. Industry: Manufacturing of packaging closures Outlook: Growing in a shrinking market by taking market share from competitors. BottleTop has set an aggressive revenue growth target of $50M by 2011/12.
TechMakers Turnover: $7 M Employees 70 Profit: Trading profitably Industry: Contract Electronic Manufacturers. Outlook: Industry is shrinking, work is increasingly being sent off shore, TechMakers are diversifying by creating and selling the devices they created to assist in their contract electronic manufacturing activities.
SwivelMould Turnover: $20M Employees: 80 Profit: trading profitably, but recently burdened by a major bad debt. Industry: Rotational Moulding Outlook: Rapid growth during drought through manufacture of water tanks,
Table 2. Key issues related to technology adoption BottleTop
TechMakers
SwivelMould
The company managers view their employees as loyal, and based on a long association, almost like family. Some staff members resent the profits they believe the company owners are making and draw unfavourable comparisons to their hourly wage rate. A profit sharing scheme based upon reducing the scrap rate has been enthusiastically embraced by staff. BottleTop’s labour efficiency has increased from 76 to 92% in the last year primarily attributable to their process focus as they implement Six Sigma Manufacturing techniques
No staff-related comments or concerns appeared in interviews or observations.
SwivelMould have a high employee turnover as the work is repetitive, takes place in a hot and noisy environment and does not pay high hourly rates. SwivelMould had difficulty recruiting and retaining employees while unemployment rates were low. New employees are only given formal training after they have completed a probationary period and if they appear likely to work at SwivelMould for some time.
The Quality Manager describes product tracking as “the black hole” because once a job commences no job status information is available until the end of the manufacturing run. This issue can be addressed by the organisation as TechMakers employ a full time in-house programmer. When time permits the programmer will interface product tracking with the MRP system.
Orders are received by fax and transcribed onto job sheets by hand. As jobs are completed on the shop floor the quantity, colour etc details are confirmed by the foreman writing on the same sheet. Any variations in process are also hand written on the sheet.
TechMakers processes are well developed and highly automated and with one exception, their work in progress system, discussed in the “Tracking of Products” column. A more difficult process to address concerns the performance of the distributor that acts as the exclusive Australian agent for the US manufacturer of components used by TechMakers.
SwivelMould has not mapped its processes. The process map built for one process as part of the AmI-4-SME process was the first time the company had used process mapping. Tradition and the knowledge of gang foremen are used to guide manufacturing processes.
No comments made in relation to training.
SwivelMould has developed a competency based training program in conjunction with an external training consultant. The objectives of the training are to increase productivity, quality and produce a change in the organisational culture.
Staff
Tracking of Products Product tracking is highly automated, integrated links between moulding machines and software packages running on PCs provide a real time view of activity.
Process Improvements BottleTop is using six sigma methods to improve quality, reduce product variability and reduce waste. The company is focussing on improving each process prior to automating it. As the Operations Manager states “We want to have strong processes, we don’t want rubbish processes just being done more quickly.” When quality processes are in place BottleTop’s focus will shift to automation and then to monitoring. Training Courses A mix of in-house and external training is used at BottleTop. External training is used to provide Six Sigma training.
continued on following page 73
Process Innovation with Ambient Intelligence (AmI) Technologies in Manufacturing SMEs
Table 2. continued BottleTop
TechMakers
SwivelMould
BottleTop managers are optimistic about their ability to grow revenue in a shrinking market. However, growing acceptance of closure systems make in countries with low labour rates may limits their growth.
TechMakers is and is the oldest and fourth largest contract electronic manufacturer (CEM) in Australia. The CEO is content to remain the fourth largest firm and claims there are advantages in not being the biggest player in the Australian market. The market for CEMs in Australia is shrinking as work moves off-shore. While the Quality Assurance Manager believes the company is committed to increasing revenue, the CEO (who is the owner of the company) stated privately that his objective is to improve the profitability of operations.
SwivelMould’s ambitious expansion plans are on track to deliver the anticipated growth in revenue. However as rain water tanks provide 5560% of annual revenue SwivelMould’s plans are dependent to some extent upon the maintenance of government rebate policies, and continuation of Australia’s ten year drought. During the course of the study the drought broke on the eastern seaboard, reducing demand for rainwater tanks. While newer entrants to the market have been unable to cope with the downturn in the tank business, SwivelMould’s Managing Director is confident of its ability to continue its expansion due to investments made in new products and its pursuit of new markets.
TechMakers are pursuing export opportunities for the technologies they have invented in house. They do not intend to attempt to compete with CEMs located overseas.
A reduction in demand for water tanks has occurred with the breaking of the drought in two cities (Sydney and Brisbane). To some extent this has been offset by increases in exports; the quantity of goods exported to the USA and China has trebled in the last year.
Highly integrated with and automated by ICT systems.
Rudimentary documentation, handwritten and physically carried between office and factory floor. Little integration with ICT systems.
Growth
Overseas Operations Sixty per cent of the company’s revenue is derived from importation and distribution activities. Logistics is important and problematic for the company as products imported as finished goods create significant supply chain challenges. BottleTop is considering employing a logistics outsourcing firm to manage these challenges Documentation & Processes Highly integrated with and automated by ICT systems.
cent of BottleTop’s product volume results from standing contracts with its top twenty customers. Beyond the top twenty customers is what the Operations Manager refers to as a “long tail” of hundreds of small customers. In contrast, TechMakers survives in a shrinking market due to its flexibility, rapid prototyping turn-around and high quality output. The CEO and Quality Assurance manager concur that “every day is different.” SwivelMould’s operations sit between the other two SMEs. SwivelMould offers a full service from product concept through design to manufacture. As each type of product requires a specialised mould, batch runs are used in production. While safety equipment is in use at TechMakers and BottleTop, SwivelMould employees resist using
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standard safety equipment such as hard hats and hearing protection. Only foremen wear high visibility vests. The Managing Director describes these actions as symptomatic of the “70s culture” that he is trying to change.
AmI Technology Recommendations The Australian SMEs The wide range of technical skill levels in the three Australian SME manufacturers results in very few similarities in their technological capacities. The staff in two of the SMEs are happy with the opportunity to enhance their skills and comfortable with process change. In all the SMEs the arrival
Process Innovation with Ambient Intelligence (AmI) Technologies in Manufacturing SMEs
of technology that is industry-specific is seen as a form of “natural progression” from previous machines. In one SME (SwivelMould) the CEO is experienced difficulty in moving staff away from established skills and procedures. The recommendations for the SMEs were tailored to the existing environment of each organisation in terms of industry segment and their legacy ICT systems. In the case of SwivelMould, recommendations were made for AmI technologies that either link together existing “islands” of ICT equipment or provide quickly implemented, stand-alone solutions to environmental issues. For example, a recommendation to implement an integrated manufacturing system, taking advantage of the flexibility of wireless communications was made. As Kirchoff, Stockic and Sundmaeker (2006) assert, if insufficient or poorly integrated ICT infrastructure exists the first step towards obtaining the benefits of AmI technologies is to introduce ICT systems to support general manufacturing processes. Given the size of SwivelMould’s operations, it is likely that a standardised manufacturing package working on a PC/Windows, Unix or Linux operating environment will address this need. To provide a small example of the benefits available, using a secure on-line order entry system will avoid the need to manually transfer order details faxed to SwivelMould by their distributors onto worksheets. The second organisation, TechMakers presents a challenge as their business is manufacturing electronic devices and sub-assemblies, effectively acting as an outsourced technology design and manufacture facility for their clients. TechMakers are well aware of AmI technologies and would have already incorporated them into their operations if they had identified potential applications. Furthermore, their key business issues concern their contracting market and their dependency upon an intermediary distributor to order components from the USA. For TechMakers, the benefits available from AmI technology may
exist in opportunities to design, manufacture or modify AmI systems for other companies. At BottleTop an alert system based on AmI technologies in the form of wireless communications has the potential to improve productivity by decreasing the number and duration of production stoppages caused by machine parameters moving out of set tolerances, and release personnel from repetitive inspection tasks for higher value, and more rewarding and interesting work. The following section compares the detailed findings from one Australian SME (BottleTop) with those from a German SME participating in the European AmI4-SMEs project. Despite differences in industry and location, both these SMEs have very similar opportunities to address production issues using AmI Technologies, pointing to the potential for standardised AmI based solutions to improve SME manufacturing operations.
Comparison between European and Australian SME Manufacturers German SME (Truckbody GmbH) Truckbody GmbH claims market leadership for EU manufacture of truck swap bodies (steel framed transport containers, and the legs on which they stand while waiting transfer from truck to truck, or truck to rail) primarily intended for the EU domestic market. A key competence is the manufacture and powder coating of large structures, up to 15m long, such as bus frames. The company employs 330 people, which places it in the EU classification of SME organisations, in contrast to Australia where a SME is classified as an organisation with between 20 and 200 employees. Truckbody’s production system is characterized by strong interdependencies between different task groups; a delay in one step impacts many other groups further down the production line. To reduce production delays the EU Ami-4SMEs project research and technology partners identified a need for automatic production alerts
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that interfaced to the company’s planning system. The ATB Institute for Applied Systems Technology, based in Bremen, Germany is the project leader of the EU AmI-4-SMEs project, and is currently finalising the implementation of a rule engine and user interfaces on mobile devices. When problems occur in Truckbody’s production, employees who need to know about the disruption, such as the shift supervisor and the person with the skill to solve the problem, receive an automatically generated alert message. The alerts are based on user profiles (e.g. manager, foreman), the current location of the user (e.g. meeting, office, home) and the severity of the situation (e.g. deviation threshold, breakdown, loss). Use of a multi-modal user interface, (specifically a wireless message sent to a mobile phone or PDA) leverages the capability of AmI technologies to provide timely alerts that are “pushed” to relevant employees regardless of their location. In this manner, the AmI technology provides immediate and mobile access to production information, warns of delays to the production line, and so supports reallocation of work and staff. Prototypes have been developed as part of the Selection and Specification phase of the study.
Australian SME (BottleTop Pty Ltd) BottleTop produces a very different product from that of Truckbody GmbH. BottleTop manufactures specialty packaging, with particular strengths in the personal care, pharmaceutical, health foods, chemical, cleaning, food, beverage and cosmetics markets. Operating for sixty years from its single Sydney manufacturing site, it has built a strong sense of loyalty among its 97 employees, and has extensive links to international fastening manufacturers. Although plastic manufacturing accounts for around 7% of all Australian manufacturing activity, the industry is quite mature (McCaffrey, 2006), and is shrinking at around 4% per year, mainly due to increased purchases from foreign injection
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moulding companies. BottleTop is growing in this shrinking market, winning market share from its competitors by focussing on quality, service, technology and relationships within and outside the organisation. The company plans to more than double its revenue by 2011/12. While the revenue goal is ambitious, BottleTop’s revenue grew by 12% in 2006 even after allowing for a 5% reduction in revenue from its existing customer base due to some customers moving their business to off-shore suppliers. Discussions with BottleTop’s Production Management team identified the following AmI technology scenario as an attractive business concept: BottleTop’s moulding and assembly machines have in-built Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) which can monitor the six key variables that control the formation of the plastic closure. If a software program collects and monitors the PLC data, when any of these six parameters move outside pre-set limits an SMS alert to a mobile phone, or pager message could be automatically generated and sent to on-site maintenance personnel. This provides several potential business benefits, including minimization of machine downtime, reduction of defective, scrapped product and reduced need for visual inspection. Currently all the plastic fasteners are inspected by a human operator as they leave the machine. Previous attempts to use computers coupled to cameras to replace human visual inspection of parts leaving the injection moulding machines were not successful due to the camera’s inability to cope with reflective foil routinely used in BottleTop’s products. It is important to note that the company’s HR practices are likely to support the introduction of the proposed AmI solution. A bonus scheme rewarding operators for reducing the amount of defective caps produced from each machine has been enthusiastically embraced; operators have been heard to comment, “That’s my money on the floor” when the speed of the machine is set too fast and fasteners overshoot the hopper.
Process Innovation with Ambient Intelligence (AmI) Technologies in Manufacturing SMEs
The preceding comparison demonstrates that despite operating in unrelated industries in different countries, some SME manufacturing processes have sufficient commonality to permit the development of generic AmI solutions. Furthermore, the appearance of the same requirement in different manufacturing contexts shows that AmI technologies have the potential to be “general purpose” production enablers in diverse SME manufacturing settings. This in turn suggests the possibility that affordable “turn-key” AmI solutions may become available from technology providers. The next section considers the possibility of third party technology providers tailoring generic AmI solutions to the specific requirements of each SME, thus overcoming the absorptive capacity limitations inherent in SMEs.
DISCUSSION AND DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH In Australian manufacturing SMEs, there is a very low likelihood of in-house R&D being used to build absorptive capacity to investigate AmI technologies. SMEs prefer to buy new technology when it is already embedded in an industry specific product rather than master the details of the underlying innovation (Oyelaran-Oyeyinka & Lal, 2006). Instead, we propose that SMEs are more likely to use industry or informal networks to become aware of potentially useful innovations, and then “buy” the innovation embedded in capital equipment or consulting services as a means to ‘recognise the value of new information, assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends’ (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990, p.128). However, Cohen and Levinthal (1990) question the effectiveness of “buying” absorptive capacity in the form of consulting services or through acquisitions when the knowledge is to be integrated with existing business systems. They state “To integrate certain classes of complex and sophisticated technological knowledge successfully into
the firm’s activities, the firm requires an existing internal staff of technologists and scientists who are both competent in their fields and are familiar with the firm’s idiosyncratic needs, organizational procedures, routines, complementary capabilities, and extramural relationships” (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990, p. 135). Out-sourcing of deep absorptive capacity to equipment and software vendors able to provide “turn-key” solutions that match industry requirements seems to be a way for manufacturing SMEs to gain the commercial benefits of AmI technologies despite the resource and time constraints that prevent them building absorptive capacity in any area other than their core business competence. Similar requirements appear in two very different SMEs on two continents. The potential for the same AmI technology solution components to address these requirements, albeit tailored to the specifics of equipment in use at each site, suggests that SMEs can benefit from AmI technologies by using specialised intermediary organisations to provide the “absorptive capacity” on their behalf. This finding points to potential links between absorptive capacity and “make vs. buy” decision-making, and to “broad” or “deep” versions of absorptive capacity (Henard & McFadyen, 2006) as avenues for future research. In addition, an opportunity exists to track the spread of AmI technologies in SME Australian manufacturers and in doing so contribute to the diffusion of innovation literature. Additionally, AmI implementation challenges for Australian SME manufacturers extend beyond the boundaries of their own organisations. Large ICT manufacturers use a channel marketing approach to sell their products to the SME market segment. The channels may include retail and direct sales forces, but frequently hardware is “bundled” with service and software offerings from business partners, specialising in a particular industry segment, such as manufacturing. While intermediary business partners may supply specialised knowledge and generic AmI solutions to compensate for limited SME absorp-
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Process Innovation with Ambient Intelligence (AmI) Technologies in Manufacturing SMEs
tive capacity, the organisations that partner with large ICT providers are often SMEs themselves. The ability and willingness of these business partners to gain AmI skills may in turn be a limiting factor in the adoption of AmI technologies by Australian Manufacturing SMEs. Absorptive capacity limitations of SME organisations can potentially affect uptake of AmI technologies at two points: within the manufacturing SME and within the SME technology partner. Low levels of in-house AmI skills and heavy level reliance on SME Australian technology providers suggest there may be an argument for the provision of government subsidies to encourage the adoption of AmI technologies in Australian manufacturing. A precedent exists in that subsidies have been provided for the purchase of RFID scanners for NSW meat producers (NSW Farmers Association, 2007). Without some form of government encouragement, the task of integrating AmI systems with existing ICT investments and the concomitant diversion from core manufacturing activities, may be enough to prevent the adoption of AmI technologies and, therefore, achievement of the elusive “productivity surge” in Australian manufacturing SMEs.
GmbH, 2008) suggest that SMEs can use “external research sub-units” in the form of experiences reported by members of their industry network and trade associations, and solutions proposed by research and technology providers, to offset internal absorptive capacity limitations.
CONCLUSION
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank the SME participants in the Australian AmI-4-SME project for providing access to, and information about their organisations. We would also like to thank our colleagues in Australia, Assoc. Prof. Mile Terziovski and Richard Ferrers at the University of Melbourne, Dr David Low at the University of Western Sydney and our colleagues at the ATB Institute for Applied Systems Technology; Bremen, Germany for their helpful advice and the opportunity to compare Australian and EU based SMEs. The authors would also like to acknowledge the support of an International Science Linkages grant from the Australian Department of DIISR (Project Number CG110181), the University of Western Sydney and the University of Melbourne.
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Oyelaran-Oyeyinka, O., & Lal, K. (2006). SMEs and New Technologies; Learning E-Business and Development. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave McMillan. doi:10.1057/9780230625457 Philips, R. (1997). Innovation and Firm Performance in Australian Manufacturing. Industry Commission Staff Research Paper. Canberra, AGPS Rao, B., & Zimmermann, H.-D. (2005). Pervasive Computing and Ambient Intelligence: Preface [Electronic Version]. Electronic Markets, 15, p. 3. Retrieved June 3, 2008 from http://www. informaworld.com/ smpp/ftinterface ~content= a713735017 ~fulltext= 713240928.
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Ambient Intelligence Technologies (AmI): Technologies that combine to create an environment that is are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing: Terms in use in the USA to refer to the same technologies as those named Ambient Intelligence Technologies in Europe Absorptive Capacity: The absorptive capacity of a firm is comprised of its ability to generate innovations, and absorb relevant knowledge appearing in the external environment. Small Medium Enterprise SME: Small to Medium Enterprise. This measure of a company’s size is generally based upon employee numbers, and varies across countries.
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Process Innovation with Ambient Intelligence (AmI) Technologies in Manufacturing SMEs
Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID): Data collection devices consisting of electronic tags for storing unique identifying data. Technology Adoption: A process that begins with awareness of a specific type of technology or device, and progresses through stages ending in use or rejection of the technology.
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Open Innovation: Organisations using ideas and capabilities originating outside their boundaries in order to increase the rate with which innovation occurs and decrease innovation costs. Open innovation also includes an organisation selling innovative ideas it has generated but cannot use in its business.
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Chapter 6
Providing Ubiquitous Access to Synthetic Sign Language Contents over Multiple Platforms Fernando López-Colino Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain Jose Colás Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
ABSTRACT This work presents the design of a distributed sign language synthesis architecture. The main objective of this design is to adapt the synthesis process to the diversity of user devices. The synthesis process has been divided into several independent modules that can be run either in a dedicated server or in the client device. Depending on the modules assigned to the server or to the client, four different scenarios have been defined. These scenarios may vary from a heavy client design which executes the whole synthesis process, to a light client design similar to a video player. These four scenarios will provide equivalent signed message quality independently of the device’s hardware and software resources.
INTRODUCTION Sign language (SL) synthesizers have been designed as PC-based applications because they DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch006
require complex calculations, specific libraries, and 3D capable devices. Current mobile device hardware and software resources do not fulfill all these requirements. Although several mobile devices can manage simple 3D contents and real time animations, they cannot manage the previ-
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Providing Ubiquitous Access to Synthetic Sign Language Contents over Multiple Platforms
ous steps that generate the final animation of the virtual avatar. Unfortunately, there are many real situations where a mobile device is the only alternative to obtain access to signed contents, such as: real-time translation, virtual museum guides, transport information services, etc. Existing approaches to providing signed contents focus only on a single platform. The adaptation between different technologies is an expensive process that requires repeating the comprehensibility evaluations in order to check that the signed messages obtained with the new implementation are comprehensible. The purpose of this chapter is to present a global and unique solution to providing synthetic signed contents to most kinds of devices, from PCs to mobile phones and gaming consoles. Instead of reducing the synthesis features using a low quality avatar or adapting the synthesis method to the device resources, our approach assigns to the user’s device only the modules that it can manage. The signed messages must present the same quality and intelligibility device independently. The architecture uses a unique module responsible for the definition of the avatar’s animation, which defines the message comprehensibility; therefore we avoid repeating this evaluation.
BACKGROUND Literature provides several examples of SL synthesizers. In order to represent synthetic signed messages, two main techniques have been developed: 1. The first approach to SL synthesis consists of creating a composition of small segments of video (Solina, Krapež, Jaklič, & Komac, 2001). This approach to SL synthesis requires image processing and a great number of pre-recorded sequences in order to act as a synthesizer, and thus significant storage capacity.
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2. The second main approach to SL synthesis uses virtual avatars. H-Anim (ISO/IEC 19774, 2005) is the most widely used avatar structure; it is a standard definition for human representation on VRML (ISO/IEC 14772-1, 1997) or X3D (ISO/IEC 19775, 2004). Within avatar animation category, there are two different approaches related to the definition of the animation. The first one uses continuous motion data obtained from (a) an expert signer using different motion capture techniques or (b) manual animations created by an expert animator. Although the results obtained with this technique are natural, Kennaway (2002) described several disadvantages of this approach based on the difficult adaptation of the recorded data to avatars with different anatomies. The second approach to define the animation for avatar-based SL synthesis uses a parametric definition of the signs in order to generate the animation (Bangham, Cox, Elliot, Glauert, & Marshall, 2000; Irving & Foulds, 2005; Kennaway, Glauert, & Zwitserlood, 2007; Zwiterslood, Verlinden, Ros, & van der Shoot, 2004). The resulting avatar animation is not as natural as the one obtained using the continuous motion data approach. However, the animation quality is the same over the whole sentence and the storage requirements are highly reduced. The parametric synthesis is the only approach that provides enough flexibility to define all the SL linguistic variations. Our synthesis approach presents the signed message using a 3D avatar and is based on parametric sign definitions. Hence, it is also interesting to review the existing research focused on handling 3D contents over mobile devices. All authors agree that mobile device resources, specifically those required resources for running 3D applications, are limited. Boukerche and Pazzi (2006) proposed the use of a remote rendering technique to deal
Providing Ubiquitous Access to Synthetic Sign Language Contents over Multiple Platforms
with the lack of resources of these devices. On the other hand, Nadalutti, Chittaro and Buttussi (2006) presented a render application for mobile devices using the X3D standard for VRML applications and Lukashev, Puresev, and Makhlushev (2006) reported the available 3D API for Java-based mobile phones. Both papers concluded that the scene complexity rendered on these devices cannot be the same as on PCs. Agu, Banerjee, Nilekar, Rekutin and Kramer (2005)proposed several techniques to simplify several aspects of the 3D scene, such as geometric complexity adaptation or the use of progressive meshes. However, these techniques cannot be automatically applied to the avatar definition, as they may reduce its intelligibility. Finally, we review several projects focused on providing signed contents to mobile devices. Ahmed and Seong (2006) proposed an application that displays signed contents using the SignWriting notation (Sutton, 1974). The SignWriting notation is more suitable for deaf people that text, however its relation to SL is the same relation between text and speech and it is not the preferred communication approach among deaf people. Representing signed contents on mobile devices follow the same research approaches described for desktop synthesizers: 1. Several projects use video recordings to provide signed contents: Kimura et al. (2008) retrieved tagged videos to be played in the mobile device, the project Blue Sign Translator (Bennati, Capasso, Giallombardo, Maggio & Giorgi, 2006) concatenated several pre-recorded videos in order to synthesize the signed message. These videos were stored and concatenated in a server previously to sending them to the mobile device.↜Although it cannot be considered SL synthesis, we would like to emphasize the work presented by Cherniavsky, Cavender, Ladner, and Riskin (2007). Their study of the frame rate required for SL video conferenc-
ing can be also applied to the streaming of synthetic SL contents. 2. The avatar-based approach for providing signed contents on mobile devices uses manually-defined animations (Chittaro, Buttusi, & Nadalutti, 2006; Xu, Wang, Yao, Zhang, & Zhao, 2008) and VRML viewers installed on the mobile device. A SL expert defines each sign by means of its most relevant static gestures and next the system creates the final animation interpolating the orientation of each skeleton bone between these static gestures. This approach only handles the animation of the avatar, but the generation of the avatar’s gestures is a manual process and does not exploit the advances applied on desktop synthesizers.
DISTRIBUTED ARCHITECTURE The SL synthesizer has been designed to deal with the great diversity of the final user devices. In order to cover most hardware and software platforms, a distributed architecture has been established, dividing the whole process into five different and independent modules. Figure 1 depicts these five modules: the HLSML Parser module, the Retrieval module (composed by the Avatar Description Retrieval and the Sign Description Retrieval sub-modules), the Gesture Synthesis module, the Rendering module, and the Visualization module. The following subsections describe each of these modules.
HLSML Parser Module The first step of a synthesis system is the parsing of the input message. Written text is the graphical representation of speech and it is used for speech synthesizers. However, there is no standard written representation of SLs. Although there are several self contained notations that allow parametric definitions of established signs, such as SiGML
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Providing Ubiquitous Access to Synthetic Sign Language Contents over Multiple Platforms
Figure 1. This image depicts the main modules of the SL synthesis architecture
(Elliot, Glauert, Jennings & Kennaway, 2004; Kennaway, Elliot, Glauert & Parsons, 2002), SWML (Rocha & Pereira, 2001) or SEA (Herrero Blanco, 2004a), none of them has been completely accepted by the deaf community as written representation of SLs. All of these notations require deep knowledge of SL phonology to define a message. We have chosen the HLSML notation, developed by López-Colino and Colás (2009), because it focuses on message definition and SL syntax, simplifying the manual message description task. The phonologic definitions of the signs are stored in a Relational Database which allows more complex and precise definitions compared to the previously mentioned notations (the structure of the Relational Database is briefly explained in the Retrieval module section). Two relevant elements from the HLSML should be noted: the Classifier Constructions (CCs) definition (Herrero Blanco, 2004b; Liddell, 2003) and the prosodic modifiers:
requires describing avatar’s hands animation, so the complexity in the message and the parsing process is increased; the last part of this subsection reports the increase of parsing time when a CC is present in a message. 2. The prosodic modifiers that can be defined using HLSML are relevant for the Retrieval module and the Gesture Synthesis module. The Relational Database stores different representations for every sign representing different mood states. Hence, the modifiers stated in the HLSML message are used during the retrieval stage in order to obtain the correct mood variation. These modifiers also describe other prosodic aspect such as global signing speed, the transition time between signs, and the movement gentleness. The Gesture Synthesis module applies these modifications to the sign definition retrieved from the Relational Database.
1. CCs are semantically complex units in signed messages, which may imply complex signer movements similar to mimicry. The CCs can be used to describe a situation or the spatial disposition of several objects mentioned in the message. Therefore, the CCs have to be defined in the input message and processed in the Gesture Synthesis module in order to create the relevant avatar’s animation that will represent these units. The CCs definition
The HLSML Parser module has been implemented using the XML SAX parser (Megginson, 2004). In order to estimate the increase of the parsing time when processing a CC, we have measured the parsing time of several sentences including only established signs and several sentences including only CCs. We have considered only the time required by the parsing method call. The obtained results have shown that the average parsing time required for a single sign is 14 ms
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Providing Ubiquitous Access to Synthetic Sign Language Contents over Multiple Platforms
and 101 ms for a CC. Obviously, these parsing times depend on the implementation but they can be used to estimate the relation between these two message units. The CC parsing process takes approximately seven times more than parsing a established signs. This module generates (a) the sequence of signs whose phonologic descriptions have to be recovered, (b) the description of the message’s CCs, and (c) the avatar’s skin identifier (selecting avatar’s appearance) that the Retrieval module will recover from a server or a local directory, as we will describe next.
Retrieval Module This module comprises the retrieval of the avatar description (Avatar Description Retrieval submodule) and the sign descriptions (Sign Description Retrieval sub-module). The synthesizer main implementation is based on the JSR-184 standard (JSR-184 Expert Group, 2005), which is used as 3D API engine and for the scene description. One of the main contributions of this standard was the definition of the m3g-file format which allows the description of all the elements in the scene such as geometry, lights, cameras, animation tracks, mesh materials, textures, and hierarchical bone structures. The signing avatar is defined using a skeleton mesh with a multiple-material assignment. The mesh is a connected network of thousands of polygons, each of them assigned to a smoothing group and a material definition. This assignment to a smoothing group defines continuous surfaces whose illumination should be processed together in order to avoid edge effects in the visualization. The mesh is a static structure whose deformation, required to represent different gestures, implies the definition of a control structure: a skeleton. The skeleton is a hierarchical set of nodes, usually named as bones, whose reference system is defined as a set of 3D transformations applied to the reference system of its parent node. This structure defines
the inheritance of every transformation applied to a node, which emulates the behavior of a real skeleton. The skeleton mesh defines the relation between every mesh’s vertex and a group of bones. Hence, making a change to any skeleton’s bone will modify the position of the vertexes related to that bone, causing a deformation in the mesh. Every avatar’s gesture is defined by means of the orientations of several skeleton’s bones, so the avatar gesture can be specified with a very small amount of data (compared to defining the mesh deformation describing each vertex’s position). The structure of the avatar follows the design reported by López, Tejedor, Garrido, and Colás (2006), which presents two main advantages which simplified the synthesis: 1. The animation approach is exclusively based on the skeleton approach, including the face expression animation. Most approaches use a morphing approach to define several face expressions. Each of these expressions is a copy of the mesh that must be transmitted and stored in the user’s device. For mobile devices with limited storage and network capacity, the skeleton approach reduces the amount of data that has to be transmitted to the orientations of facial bones. 2. The arm’s structure has been redefined so the changes in the upper arm and forearm do not modify the orientation of the wrist. This new structure simplifies the inverse kinematics process reducing the seven degrees of freedom that must be calculated using a standard arm’s structure (like H-ANIM’s) to four degrees of freedom. The Avatar Description Retrieval sub-module recovers the avatar description and any required auxiliary file using the HTTP protocol, which allows the system to recover the m3g-formated file from a web server or from a local directory. Obtaining the avatar’s description from a web server ensures the latest version of the avatar.
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However, if the network communication should be minimized (e.g. for cost reduction), using a local copy of the avatar is also possible. The size of the latest version of the avatar’s file, dated August 2009, is 170 kB uncompressed and 76 kB compressed using “gzip” compression; the size of the related auxiliary file is 8 kB (used for skeleton management). In the previous section we presented the HLSML notation as a high level notation approach focused on sign message description as it relies on another source for storing sign phonologic definitions. Our SL synthesis approach uses a Relational Database to store these phonologic sign definitions. The Relational Database stores the Phonologic Parameters1 (PPs) and their definitions; it also stores the sequences of these PPs that describe each sign and the alternative representations of the different mood states that the avatar can represent. Using a parametric approach, the amount of data required to describe a sign is lower than the required using the motion capture approach which stores the orientation of each avatar’s joint recorded between thirty and sixty times per second. The Sign Description Retrieval sub-module defines a series of SQL queries to the Relational Database in order to recover the phonologic descriptions of the message’s signs. For each PP of every sign, the synthesizer recovers the defined sequence for that sign. Each hand may define up to six sequences; there is another sequence for the non-hand parameter, if defined. The kind of sign defines the number of sequences: a static one-handed sign only requires five sequences whereas a dynamic two-handed sign describing non-hand parameters requires thirteen sequences. After recovering the sequences, the synthesizer obtains the description of each unit included in them, which are described using 3D orientations, 3D vectors, and anatomic references (using text strings). The average amount of data (measuring 120 random signs) transmitted from the synthesizer to the database server is 15 kB per sign, cor-
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responding to SQL requests and network signaling, and the average amount of data corresponding to the SQL responses and the network signaling is 33.6 kB per sign. The CCs differ from the established signs in the amount of data recovered from the Relational Database. The CCs have only to recover the description of the PPs units included in the CC, as the sequences are described in the HLSML message. The average amount of data (measuring 50 different CCs) transmitted from the synthesizer to the database is 11 kB per CC, and the average amount of data recovered from the Relational Database is 21 kB per CC.
Gesture Synthesis Module The main task of the Gesture Synthesis module is to process the information obtained in the HLSML Parsing and the Retrieval modules and to define the avatar’s animation that represents the input message. Therefore, this module is the ultimate responsible of the synthetic message intelligibility. This module’s input are: (a) The message definition obtained from the HLSML Parsing module, which includes the signs sequence, the description of the CCs, and several prosodic modifiers that affect the final animation; (b) the morphologic descriptions of the signs included in the message; and (c) the definition of the avatar’s anatomy, both obtained in the Retrieval module. The avatar’s animation is described by means of Bone Animation Tracks (BATs). A BAT is a sequence of bone orientations with a timestamp that indicates the instant when the bone must reach that orientation. There are many approaches for 3D orientation definition; we have used quaternions (Hamilton, 1853) because they are the best approach for animating orientations, as stated Shoemake (1985). Therefore, the Gesture Synthesis module processes the PP definitions previously retrieved from the Relational Database to generate those bone orientations. The timestamps for each bone orientation is defined using the PP sequences (retrieved from the Relational
Providing Ubiquitous Access to Synthetic Sign Language Contents over Multiple Platforms
Database), the CCs definition from the HLSML message, and the prosodic modifiers. We have presented before that the PPs can be defined using 3D orientations, 3D vectors, and anatomic references: •
•
The 3D-orientation-defined PPs do not require further processing as the retrieved orientations can be directly used in the definition of the BATs. This PP definition is applied to hand shapes, hand orientation, body gestures, and face expressions. Both the 3D vectors and the anatomic references are used for hand positioning. The coordinates where the hands must be placed can be defined directly (by means of a 3D vector) or using a body reference, in this case, the Gesture Synthesis module obtains the coordinates of the referred anatomic point. The final sequence of coordinates require further processing in order to obtain the suitable shoulder, elbow, and wrist orientations to place the hand in the required coordinate and keeping the required hand orientation (defined by the PP hand orientation). This process is named inverse kinematics and will be briefly described next:↜The inverse kinematics process aims to obtain the required orientations of a sequence of bones in order to the final element of that sequence of bones achieves a defined position. The process may involve several orientation restrictions to some bones, increasing the complexity of the process. The standard definition of an avatar’s arm requires resolving a seven degree of freedom bone structure: the shoulder defines three degrees of freedom, the elbow defines one, and the wrist defines the last three degrees of freedom. As we have stated before, the avatar’s arm proposed by López et al. (2006) simplifies the inverse kinematics process as the wrist’s orientation is not modified by the
orientations of the shoulder and the elbow, removing the wrist’s degrees of freedom from the inverse kinematics process. Even with this simplification, the inverse kinematics process is the most time-consuming part of the synthesis process, as it is reported in the last part of this section.↜The transition between two consecutive coordinates defined for a hand can cause the hand to collide with the avatar’s body or head. This situation must be avoided using a collision detection and avoidance algorithm. The Gesture Synthesis module includes an algorithm that detects a collision between the hand and the body or the head and creates a collision-free trajectory. The collision avoidance algorithm requires a great amount of verifications in order to check if there is a collision in a defined instant; the algorithm conducts these verifications in different instants during each transition, converting the collision avoidance algorithm into the second most time-consuming process of the whole SL synthesis. The Gesture Synthesis module contains the two most time-consuming processes of the SL synthesis, the inverse kinematics process and the collision avoidance algorithm. As the execution of this module supposes a great challenge for the device, this module should be considered for server-side execution.
Rendering Module The rendering process consists of the generation of a 2D image (frame) from a 3D scene definition. The 3D animated scene definition is created by merging the scene definition retrieved from the Web Server and the BATs created in the Gesture Synthesis module. Each time the Rendering module has to generate one image, it has to carry out the update of the animated scene, which means that the orientation of each skeleton’s bone has to
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be defined (this process will be explained next) and updating the mesh deformation as defined by the new skeleton bones’ orientation to obtain the positions of all the mesh’s polygons. When all the polygons are in their final position, the 3D engine defines the colors of each calculating the received illumination, their original color, and the applied texture. Finally, the system projects the 3D coordinates into the projection plane that is represented in the screen. The duration of this complex process depends on the number of polygons defined in the scene, the number of lights, and the complexity of the textures. The Rendering module generates a video signal, which can be stored in a video file if necessary, corresponding to the animation defined in the Gesture Synthesis module. This video signal is the input of the Visualization module. The previous subsection has defined the BATs as discrete sequences of quaternions that define the bone’s orientation in a precise instant of time; each of these timed-quaternions is named a keyframe. If the rendering instant does not coincide with one of these keyframes, the bone’s orientation must be calculated using interpolation algorithms. The Rendering module allows using two different interpolation algorithms: a linear interpolator which only considers the previous and the following keyframes and a spline-based interpolator which considers the whole animation definition in order to create a smoother transition between the values of all the keyframes. It must be noted that the complexity of the interpolation algorithm changes the duration of the rendering process. We can define two different rendering approaches: 1. The first approach is the real time rendering, as the application presents the resulting 2D image to the user after it has been processed. In this approach, the period of time between two consecutive images depends on the time required for processing and rendering each
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image; this time also defines the animation instant to be presented. Therefore, the final animation fluidness, which directly affects the user’s experience, depends on the capacity of the final user’s device to process each image fast enough. The maximal time interval between two consecutive frames for a fluid animation is 60 ms approximately, which corresponds to a 16 frames per second animation rate. The time interval depends both on final user’s device hardware and software resources and system’s load. The first factor will define the highest rendering frame rate that the device can handle, but this frame rate is limited by system’s load. The system’s load depends on background programs activity; so changes in this activity will affect the rendering process and randomize the time interval between frames. 2. The second rendering approach is the nonreal time rendering approach. Previous rendering approach describes how the frame rendering time has influence on real time visualization, but if the visualization can be delayed, the frame rendering time has no effect. The time interval between two consecutive frames can be defined to fulfill any video format and ensure the fluidness of the animation, independently of the required time to process each frame. In addition, this approach also allows using complex rendering algorithms, advanced lightning, and more detailed textures in order to obtain a photorealistic result. The Rendering module allows two different approaches to generate the animated sequence: the real time rendering approach presents one advantage because it does not require storing the results of the rendering, as they are instantly displayed and every image is discarded when the following one has been processed. This real time rendering approach also has the disadvantage of the animation variable fluidness and the limitation
Providing Ubiquitous Access to Synthetic Sign Language Contents over Multiple Platforms
applied to image complexity and realism in order to reduce processing time. The non-real time presents the opposite advantages and disadvantages, as they complement each other.
Visualization Module The visualization of the resulting animated sequence is the last stage of the process. This module processes the video signal obtained from the Rendering module and presents it in the device’s screen. Therefore, the user’s device must run this module. Previous section described the relation between the Rendering module and the Visualization module. There are three different approaches for the Visualization module depending on whether it is run in the same device as the Rendering module or not and the rendering approach used: 1. The first approach is applied when both modules are run in the same device and the real time rendering approach is in use. The Rendering module video signal output is directly presented to the user. In this approach, the Visualization module acts as a simple interface between the Rendering module and the graphic device. This approach is equivalent to a 3D video game: real time rendering and local visualization. 2. The second approach is applied when the Rendering module is run in a server and the Visualization module in the user’s device and the real time rendering approach is in use. This approach is also known as remote rendering; each time a frame has been generated, the server sends it to the user’s device using any available network connection. This approach is similar to a video streaming, but this time the server generates the video “on the fly”. 3. The third approach is applied when the Rendering module uses the non-real time approach. The output of the Rendering
module has been previously stored in a video file and the Visualization module acts as a standard video player. In this approach, the resolution of the video and the compression codec can be adapted to the specifications of the user’s device.
Complexity of the Architecture’s Modules Previous subsections have described the five modules of the architecture. The aim of this subsection is to present the complexity of each module in order to define which modules should be run in a dedicated server depending on the user device’s resources. We have stated before that the final user device must run the Visualization module, so we will omit measuring its complexity. We also omit presenting the complexity of the Rendering module, as its performance is hardware related. Only devices which integrate dedicated 3D hardware will run the Rendering module, so assigning this module to the server depends on this feature. On the other hand, the complexity of the first three modules of the architecture has to be measured to decide whether they can be run in the user device or not. Using a desktop implementation of the architecture, we have measured the required time to run the HLSML Parsing, the Sign Description Retrieval, and the Gesture Synthesis modules. The Table 1 presents the results obtained using the following hardware configuration: a Pentium Core 2 Duo system with 3.12 GB of RAM memory and Java 1.6.0. The 3D API is the Hybrid Rasteroid J2RE implementation (Hybrid, 2006) of the JSR-184 standard. The table presents the average time measured after synthesizing forty times each kind of sign and CC. The static units (both signs and CCs) define a static gesture of the avatar whereas the dynamic units include the movement of the hands (so the collision avoidance algorithm is required).
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Table 1. This table presents the time measures (in ms) for the first three modules of the synthesizer using different kinds of signs and CCs Sign One-handed sign Module
CC Two-handed sign
Static
Dynamic
14 (0.3%)
15.5 (5.2%)
101.5 (2.2%)
97.8 (10.7%)
101.3 (2%)
32 (10.7%)
56 (1.2%)
673.2
2674
238.5
2312
Static
Dynamic
Static
Dynamic
HLSML Parsing
14 (5.5%)
14 (1%)
14 (1.5%)
Sign Description Retrieval
65.1 (26%)
74.2 (5.3%)
161.3
718
Inverse kinematics Gesture Synthesis
Collision avoidance BAT generation Total
0
589.4
0
2130
0
2058
11.7
12.4
126.9
114.7
11.8
11.9
172 (68.5%)
1319.8 (93.7%)
800.1 (87.8%)
4918.7 (97.7%)
250.3 (84.1%)
4381.9 (96.6%)
The Gesture Synthesis module requires up to a 97.7% of the processing time consumed by the three modules. This time measure is consistent with the statement presented when describing the Gesture Synthesis module as the inverse kinematics and the collision avoidance processes require complex calculations. Therefore, mobile devices with low processing resources should avoid running the Gesture Synthesis module and rely on a server for generating the BATs.
FINAL USER DEVICE ADAPTATION The previous section presented the architecture of the synthesizer. This architecture can be divided in three main blocks: the first block groups the HLSML Parsing, the Retrieval, and the Gesture Synthesis modules; the second block is the Rendering module; and the third one is the Visualization module, which must be run in the user device. Depending on the user device’s hardware and software resources the first two blocks can be run on the user device or on a dedicated synthesis server. It must be noted that once a module has been assigned to the server, all the previous modules have to be run in the server. We propose four different scenarios depending on the blocks
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distribution and the communication interface (see Figure 2): 1. The Alpha scenario assigns all the modules to the user device defining a heavy client approach. 2. The Beta scenario only assigns the Visualization module to the user device, leaving the other four modules run to the server. 3. The Gamma scenario assigns the Rendering and the Visualization modules to the user device and the server sends an m3g-formatted file containing the avatar description and the BATs to the client. 4. The Delta scenario also assigns the Rendering and the Visualization modules to the user device. In contrast to the Gamma scenario, the Delta scenario only sends the Animation Definition to the client, establishing a 3D API independent scenario.
Alpha Scenario: The Desktop Application The first scenario is equivalent to other desktop synthesis approaches, as it is designed for PC devices. The user device runs all the five modules
Providing Ubiquitous Access to Synthetic Sign Language Contents over Multiple Platforms
Figure 2. The modular architecture allows four different scenarios: Alpha) A heavy client running the whole SL synthesis system. Beta) The light client scenario focused on the visualization. Gamma) This scenario is oriented to 3D capable devices using the JSR-184 API. Delta) A multi 3D API scenario allowing devices based on different 3D architectures.
of the architecture, as PCs have enough resources to run them. The HLSML message can be manually defined (as shown in Figure 3), automatically obtained form a translation server, or downloaded from a server, depending on the architecture that includes this synthesizer. This is a heavy client approach and there is no need of a synthesis server. The network load is high as the application has to make several queries to the Relational Database and download the avatar description from the Web server, if required.
Figure 3. This figure represents a screenshot of the Desktop application developed using the Alpha scenario approach
Beta Scenario: Devices without 3D Capabilities This is the light client approach, mainly focused on weak and mobile client devices; it can be also applied to web browsers, or TDT subtitling. This scenario is useful for non-real time synthetic signed messages distribution, which implies storing the videos, and is the best solution for multimedia and offline applications. Figure 4 shows an example of this scenario, where the user device is
a Nintendo DS portable console. Developing an application for game consoles is more complex than the development of PC-based applications. For this scenario we have used the “Moonshell” video player for the Nintendo DS and the server uses the specific codec for this video player. Using
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Figure 4. This figure shows the synthetic signed message in a Nintendo DS using the Beta scenario
the wifi connection available on the Nintendo DS, the video file is transmitted to the gaming device. The communication between the server and the client is based on video transmission; Figure 2 depicts two alternatives for this transmission. The first approach is based on file transmission; the Rendering module output is stored in a video file and transmitted to the client. This approach requires the Rendering module to finish generating the whole message, so the total duration of the synthesis process is incremented. The second approach is based on video streaming: the server transmits each frame to the client after the Rendering module has finished its process. This approach neither requires storing the Rendering output in a video file, nor has to wait till the message has been completely generated. This scenario presents the lowest client load as the client device only has to run the Visualization module. On the other hand, this scenario involves the highest network load, due to video transmission, and the highest server load because it has to run the first four modules of the architecture, and handle the video streaming process.
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Figure 5. This figure shows an m3g file player developed for a mobile device
Gamma Scenario: Java Mobile Based Devices This scenario focuses on devices with 3D capabilities, which allow handling 3D contents and animations, but their processing resources do not allow running the first three modules, just because it is impossible2 or quite complex. This scenario takes advantage of the JSR-184’s m3g file definition because it includes both geometry and scene description and animation definition. This simplifies the definition of the client application as it is a “3D file player”, a real time renderer (see Figure 5). The design of this scenario aims at Javabased mobile devices that include the JSR-184 API. These devices can handle 3D games (these 3D games use the device’s rendering capabilities), but most of them will not be able to run the complex Gesture Synthesis module. Therefore, this scenario is the best approach for providing synthetic signed contents to these devices. This scenario presents a high server load as it has to run the Gesture Synthesis module and has to generate the m3g file containing the scene definition and the BATs. The client presents a medium processing load as it has to render the
Providing Ubiquitous Access to Synthetic Sign Language Contents over Multiple Platforms
m3g file. Finally, this scenario presents a low network load as the server only requires sending a single file to the client. The average size of an m3g file is 225KB per sentence.
Figure 6. This figure shows the XNA-based implementation created to play sign animations
Delta Scenario: 3D API Independent Approach This scenario is similar to the Gamma approach; it focuses on devices with 3D capabilities. The main difference between this approach and the previous one is the contents sent to the client. This scenario only transmits the BATs created in the Gesture Synthesis module to the client. The format of these BATs has been defined as an array of orientations with a timestamp. All the arrays use the same time scale in order to synchronize all the movements. The client application adapts the BATs to the format defined by its 3D API. These 3D API can be the JSR-184, as in the Gamma scenario, or other 3D APIs as VRML, OpenGL, or XNA (Direct3D). Therefore, this scenario is useful for avoiding reimplementation of the first three modules of the architecture. Figure 6 shows the implementation of this scenario using XNA. We only had to implement the Rendering module using this 3D API (the programming language is C#), but we could reuse the HLSML Parsing, the Sign Definition Retrieval, and the Gesture Synthesis modules previously implemented, for the Alpha scenario using Java. The server load of this scenario is lower than the Gamma scenario’s because the server does not create the m3g file and it only sends the BATs, as they have been created in the Gesture Synthesis module, to the client. On the other hand the client load is higher than the Gamma scenario’s because the client has to adapt the BATs to its 3D API animation format. It also has to run the Rendering module. The network load is initially higher than the Gamma scenario approach as the client has to download the avatar’s definition and the BATs from different sources. But as the avatar’s definition is only downloaded once, the
second and subsequent sentences will imply lower network load, as the BATs required for a single sentence imply the average data transmission of 13kB.
Multi-Scenario Approach and Dynamic Scenario Switching Each of the previous scenarios has presented the kind of device that motivated its design. However, there are devices that can handle several of the presented scenarios, like a PC. For this reason, the last final user adaptation approach defines a multi-scenario approach applied for those devices that can handle several ones. The choice of the scenario is based on server’s load and network’s load and cost. User’s preferences are only considered to minimize economic costs, as the quality of the signed message is scenario independent and the user cannot distinguish between them3. The dynamic scenario switch is only possible between different signed blocks (sentences or paragraphs). The Beta, Gamma, and Delta scenarios can be described as different approaches to a synthesis service, with different degrees of server processing load. The Alpha scenario does not assume any
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Providing Ubiquitous Access to Synthetic Sign Language Contents over Multiple Platforms
server load as the whole synthesis process is run in the client device. Depending on the number of clients connected to the synthesis server and the scenarios that they can run, the server will handle their requests using the most suitable scenario. For example, a PC-based client may start using the Beta scenario but if the server’s load rises, the system can dynamically change to the Alpha scenario, so the server can manage the request of other devices that cannot handle the most demanding scenarios. The network load and cost is also considered when choosing the scenario. For example, a pocket PC device can be either connected using a free wifi connection or a payment 3G connection. Depending on the used wireless network, the system will switch between the Beta and the Gamma scenarios.
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS Future work is closely related with new mobile devices, new wireless communications, and new 3D API standards. New portable devices with higher processing resources will allow the development of a pseudo-Alpha scenario, using the server resources only for the inverse kinematics and the collision avoidance algorithms. The new wireless communications (meaning faster and cheaper communications) will allow the transmission of more realistic textures and avatars for the Alpha, Gamma, and Delta scenarios and high resolution videos for the Beta scenario. In order to adapt to new 3D APIs, it will be necessary the development of new client applications for the Delta scenario-based approach. The XNA-based development, currently used for the Delta scenario and run on PC environment, can be adapted to the XBOX; this would represent the first approach which would integrate synthetic signed contents into one of the main gaming consoles.
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CONCLUSION This chapter presents a global solution to providing synthetic signed contents on most kinds of devices with the same quality and reducing the development efforts. The architecture of the system is divided into several different modules that can be assigned to a dedicated server when they cannot be run in the client device. This approach allows providing the same synthetic signed contents regardless the available hardware and software resources. The final user’s device adaptation is done by means of one of the four different distributions of the main modules of the architecture. The system can also switch between different scenarios, when available, allowing network and server load dynamic balancing. The switch between the scenarios is transparent to the user and it does not deteriorate user’s experience. The main architecture is implemented using Java, J2RE for the desktop design and J2ME for the mobile implementation. Hence, the adaptation between different systems supporting Java is simplified. We also consider non Java-based devices such as Pocket PC and gaming consoles. For these devices we have proposed a 3D API independent scenario that allows providing the synthetic signed contents by means of the avatar animation definition. The defined animation is rendered using the application developed for the available 3D API, but the module that generates the animation (responsible for the message comprehensibility) is the same for each the scenario. Therefore, this approach avoids repeating the intelligibility tests required for evaluating a synthesizer implementation. The only tests that have to be repeated for each device are those related to image resolution, contrast, and visualization fluidness that can be performed in a laboratory environment.
Providing Ubiquitous Access to Synthetic Sign Language Contents over Multiple Platforms
ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank the FPU-UAM program for its financial support and the FCNSE linguistic department’s staff for their evaluation of the synthetic messages.
REFERENCES Agu, E., Banerjee, K., Nilekar, S., Rekutin, O., & Kramer, D. (2005). A middleware architecture for mobile 3D graphics. In Distributed Computing Systems Workshops, (pp. 617-623). Ahmed, A. S., & Seong, D. S. K. (2006). SignWriting on mobile phones for the deaf. In Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Mobile Technology, Applications & Systems, (pp. 1-7). New York. Bangham, A., Cox, S., Elliot, R., Glauert, J., & Marshall, I. (2000). Capture, Animation, Storage and Transmission - an Overview of the ViSiCAST Project. In IEE Seminary on Speech and Language Processing for Disabled and Elderly People. Virtual Signing. doi:10.1049/ic:20000136 Bennati, P., Capasso, T., Giallombardo, F., Maggio, E., & Giorgi, R. (2006). Blue Sign Translator. Retrieved September 30, 2009, from http:// bluesign.dii.unisi.it Boukerche, A., & Pazzi, R. W. N. (2006). Remote rendering and streaming of progressive panoramas for mobile devices. Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia, (pp. 691-694). New York. Cherniavsky, N., Cavender, A. C., Ladner, R. E., & Riskin, E. A. (2007). Variable frame rate for low power mobile sign language communication. In Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Computers and Accessibility, (pp. 163-170). New York.
Chittaro, L., Buttussi, F., & Nadalutti, D. (2006). MAge-AniM: a system for visual modeling of embodied agent animations and their replay on mobile devices. In Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, (pp. 344-351). New York, Elliot, R., Glauert, J., Jennings, V., & Kennaway, R. (2004). An Overview of the SiGML Notation and SiGML Signing Software System. In Proceedings of Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, (pp. 98-104).Lisbon. da Rocha, A. C., & Pereira, G. (2001). Supporting Deaf Sign Languages in Written Form on the Web. The SignWriting Journal (Vol. 0). Association pour le Traitement Automatique des Langues. Hamilton, S. W. R. (1853). Lectures on Quaternions. Dublin, Ireland: Royal Irish Academy. Herrero Blanco, A. (2004a). A practical writing of sign languages. In Proceedings of Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, (pp. 3742).Lisbon. Herrero Blanco, A. (2004b). Una aproximación morfológica a las construcciones clasificatorias en la lengua de signos española. In ELUA (Vol. 18, pp. 151–167). Estudios de Lingüística. Hybrid (2006). Hybrid Rasteroid. Retrieved June 2, 2006 from http://www.hybrid.fi Irving, A., & Foulds, R. (2005). A parametric approach to sign language synthesis. Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Computers and Accessibility, (pp. 212-213). New York. ISO/IEC 14772-1:1997, I. (1997). Information technology -- Computer graphics and image processing -- The Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) -- Part 1: Functional specification and UTF-8 encoding. In Geneva, Switzerland. ISO/IEC 19774:2005, (2005). Information technology -- Computer graphics and image processing -- Humanoid animation (H-Anim). Geneva, Switzerland.
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ISO/IEC 19775:2004, I. (2004). Information technology -- Computer graphics and image processing -- Extensible 3D (X3D). Geneva, Switzerland. JSR-184 Expert Group. (2005). Mobile 3D Graphics API for Java 2 Micro Edition. Retrieved June 1, 2006 from http://www.jcp.org/ en/jsr/detail?id=184 Kennaway, R. (2002). Synthetic Animation of Deaf Signing Gestures. [International Gesture Workshop, London.]. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2298, 146–157. doi:10.1007/3540-47873-6_15 Kennaway, R., Elliot, R., Glauert, J., & Parsons, K. J. (2002). SiGML Document Type Definition (DTD). In ViSiCAST Project website. Retreived March 12, 2007, from http://www.visicast.cmp. uea.ac.uk/sigml/ Kennaway, R., Glauert, J., & Zwitserlood, I. (2007). Providing signed content on the Internet by synthesized animation. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 14, 1–29. doi:10.1145/1279700.1279705 Kimura, T., Katoh, M., Hayashi, A., Kanda, K., Hara, D., & Morimoto, K. (2008). Application System of the Universal Sign Code - Development of the Portable Sign Presenter. In Heidelberg (Ed.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 5105/2008. (pp. 678-681). Liddell, S. K. (2003). Sources of Meaning in ASL Classifier Predicates. In Emmorey, K. (Ed.), Perspectives on Classifier Constructions in Sign Languages (pp. 199–220). Psichology Press. López, F., Tejedor, J., Garrido, J., & Colás, J. (2006). Use of a Hierarchical Skeleton for Spanish Sign Language 3D Representation over Mobile Devices. In Proceedings of INTERACCION, (pp. 565-568).
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López-Colino, F., & Colás, J. (2009). HLSML, una notación de alto nivel para la descripción de mensajes sintéticos en LSE[HLSML, a high level notation for describing LSE synthetic signed messages]. In Proceedings of III National Conference on Spanish Sign Language, Madrid, Spain. Lukashev, D., Puresev, A., & Makhlushev, I. (2006). 3D Applications for 3G Mobile Phones: Design, Development, Resource Utilization. In 10th International Symposium on Consumer Electronics, (pp. 1-4). Megginson, D. (2004). Simple API for XML (SAX). Retrieved November 21, 2008 from www. saxproject.org Nadalutti, D., Chittaro, L., & Buttussi, F. (2006). Rendering of X3D content on mobile devices with OpenGL ES. Proceedings of the 11th international conference on 3D web technology, (pp. 19-26). New York. Shoemake, K. (1985). Animating rotation with quaternion curves. In Proceedings of the 12th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, (pp. 245-254). New York Solina, F., Krapež, S., Jaklič, A., & Komac, V. (2001). Design and Management of Multimedia Information Systems. Chap 13: Multimedia Dictionary and Synthesis of SL (pp. 268-281). Idea Group Publishing. Sutton, V. (1974). SignWriting. Retrieved September 30, 2009, from http://www.signwriting.org/ Xu, X., Wang, X., Yao, L., Zhang, D., & Zhao, H. (2008). Avatars based Chinese Sign Language Synthesis System. In IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. (pp. 444-449). Zwiterslood, I., Verlinden, M., Ros, J., & van der Schoot, S. (2004). Synthetic Signing for the Deaf: eSIGN. In Proceedings of the Conference and Workshop on Assistive Technologies for Vision and Hearing Impairment, Granada, Spain.
Providing Ubiquitous Access to Synthetic Sign Language Contents over Multiple Platforms
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Remote Rendering: The 3D scene processing is carried out on a remote server and the results are sent as a video or an image to the client device which performs the visualization of the results. Remote Gesture Synthesis: The avatar animation definition process is carried out on a remote server, the obtained animation tracks are sent to the client using a pre-established format. Parametric Sign Language Synthesis: Generation of the synthetic signed message based on phonetic-like sign definitions, reducing the storage requirements and incrementing the linguistic flexibility. Modular Architecture: Distribution of a complex application into several and more simple units that can be run in different devices. The communication between these units is done using a predefined interface. Ubiquitous Sign Language Synthesis: Generation and access to artificial signed messages regardless the hardware and software resources of the client’s device and the quality of the network connection. Signing Avatar: Virtual anthropomorphic character used to represent signed messages. Its
animation can be manually defined, captured from a human signer, or parametrically described. HLSML: XML-based notation focused on signed message definition and its prosody; it does not require describing the phonology of the signs, as other notations do.
ENDNOTES 1
2
3
The Phonologic Parameters in SL are equivalent to the oral language phonology. Each Phonologic Parameter is composed by a set of Phonemes. The Phonologic Parameters comprise hand shape, hand orientation, location, plane, contact point, movement and non-hand parameter. The math libraries included in some mobile devices do not provide all the required features for the Gesture Synthesis module (e.g. floating point operations). The user only notices the different durations required for sign message generation when using different scenarios. In any case, no user could appreciate differences in the same signed message using different scenarios.
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Chapter 7
The Impact of MIMO Communication on NonFrequency Selective Channels Performance Andreas Ahrens Hochschule Wismar, Germany César Benavente-Peces Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
ABSTRACT This chapter reviews the basic concepts of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems and analyses their performance within non-frequency selective channels. The MIMO system model is established and by applying the singular value decomposition (SVD) to the channel matrix, the whole MIMO system can be transformed into multiple single-input single-output (SISO) channels having unequal gains. In order to analyze the system performance, the quality criteria needed to calculate the error probability of M-ary QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) are briefly reviewed and used as reference to measure the improvements when applying different signal processing techniques. Bit and power allocation is a well-known technique that allows improvement in the bit-error rate (BER) by managing appropriately the different properties of the multiple SISO channels. It can be used to balance the BER’s in the multiple SISO channels when minimizing the overall BER. In order to compare the various results, the efficiency of fixed transmission modes is studied in this work regardless of the channel quality. It is demonstrated that only an appropriate number of MIMO layers should be activated when minimizing the overall BER under the constraints of a given fixed date rate. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch007 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
The Impact of MIMO Communication on Non-Frequency Selective Channels Performance
INTRODUCTION The need for high data rate communication systems has remarkable increased in the last years due to the rising demand of wideband services like video and TV especially in mobile applications. Nevertheless, several barriers must be broken to fulfill the requirements of future communication systems. A lot of efforts and research activity has been developed in order to give answers to the challenge of increasing the spectral efficiency and improving the bit-error rate (BER) with the constraint of finding a moderate complexity implementation. Various technologies, techniques and algorithms have been developed in the last decades and researchers are working at the definition of new standards and future communication systems. Adaptive modulation (AM) is a promising technique to increase the spectral efficiency of wireless transmission systems by adapting the signal parameters, such as modulation constellation or transmit power, dynamically to changing channel conditions (Zhou et al., 2005). However, in order to comply with the demand on increasing available data rates in particular in wireless technologies, systems with multiple transmit and receive antennas, also called MIMO systems (multiple-input multiple-output), have become indispensable and can be considered as an essential part of increasing both the achievable capacity and integrity of future generations of wireless systems (Kühn, 2006; Zheng and Tse, 2003). The well-known water-filling technique is virtually synonymous with adaptive modulation and it is used for maximizing the overall data rate. However, delay-critical applications, such as voice or streaming video transmissions, may require a certain fixed data rate. For these fixed-rate applications it is desirable to design algorithms, which minimize the overall BER at a given fixed data rate. Against this background, the novel contribution of this chapter is that we demonstrate the benefits of amalgamating a suitable choice of
activated MIMO layers and number of bits per symbol along with the appropriate allocation of the transmit power under the constraint of a given data throughput.
BACKGROUND There is no doubt about the key role that communication systems have in the information society. The various available technologies allow users to share, store and transmit information to others. The rising demands of new services especially broadband ones like video require the appropriate technologies to transmit and receive information with the expected quality. The demand for higher network capacity and for higher performance of wireless networks is enormous. There are two major challenges in the design of future wireless communication systems (i.e. in LTE, Long Term Evolution): increasing the spectral efficiency (channel capacity) and improving the link reliability (BER). MIMO Systems are able to improve the spectral efficiency significantly, and consequently MIMO plays a key role in many future wireless communication systems. MIMO technology has attracted a lot of attention in wireless communications, since it offers significant increases in data throughput and link range without additional bandwidth or transmit power. It achieves this by higher spectral efficiency (more bits per second per hertz of bandwidth) and link reliability or diversity (reduced fading). Because of these properties, MIMO is a hot topic in international wireless research. Multiple antennas techniques can be used for different objectives and the most common are beamforming and transmit/receive diversity. Diversity techniques provide some protection against channel fading and increase the system range. MIMO techniques are a different way in which multiple antennas are used in a communication system.
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The Impact of MIMO Communication on Non-Frequency Selective Channels Performance
The signal propagating through the radio channel is disturbed by different effects. It suffers from fading, multipath effects, noise and interference from other users and systems. Diversity and coding are two well known techniques for combating fading. Diversity is a technique that provides the receiver with several replicas of the transmitted signal which can be processed appropriately in order to combat against fading and interference and are able to improve the link quality. There are different ways in which diversity techniques are applied (time diversity and frequency diversity). In the last years, the use of spatial diversity has become widely used due to the advantages this technique offers. One of the main properties is that it can be applied without losing spectral efficiency. The use of multiple antennas at the receive end is called receive diversity and has been studied in depth (Jakes, 1974). Space-time coding (Tarokh et al., 1998; Alamouti, 1998; Hochwald and Marzetta, 2000) is a technique that is being used in mobile communications that uses multiple antennas at the transmit side in combination with appropriate digital signal processing and coding algorithms and is attracting a lot of research activity. The use of multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver ends (the well-known multipleinput multiple-output (MIMO) technology) allows the use of techniques and algorithms to achieve high data rates and decrease the BER (Telatar, 1999). MIMO techniques take advantage of multipath to improve system performance. These techniques are known as spatial multiplexing (Bolcskei et al., 2002) or BLAST (Bell Laboratories Layered Space-Time, Foschini, 1996; Foschini and Gans, 1998) and provide a significant increase in spectral efficiency (channel capacity). The idea underlying the MIMO techniques is that the transmit and receive antenna signal’s are processed in such a way that the BER and the data rate of the communication is improved. Most of the past research activity on MIMO wireless communication techniques have been
102
focused on narrowband channels. Nevertheless, spatial diversity broadband MIMO channels offer higher capacity and frequency diversity due to delay spread. The use of OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, LeFloch et al., 1995) is being widely used because it significantly reduces the complexity at both the transmitter and receiver ends in wideband communications. The combination of MIMO techniques and OFDM modulation (Bolcskei and Paulraj, 2000) is being adopted in different standards because their promising properties.
FROM SISO TO MIMO SYSTEMS This section describes the evolution from singleinput single-output (SISO) systems, through SIMO (single-input multiple-output) and MISO (multiple-input single-output), to multiple-input multiple-output ones. The SISO channel is composed of one antenna at the transmitter side and one antenna at the receiver side. It is the conventional communication channel and constitutes the basic radio channel access mode. Equipping the transmitter and/or the receiver with more than one transmit antenna leads to some extensions which are able to outperform the BER performance of a wireless link significantly. The single-input multiple-output (SIMO) channel is composed of one antenna at the transmitter side and several antennas at the receiver side. This solution has long be considered as the classical solution for outperforming the overall quality by processing different replicas of the transmitted signal appropriately. Another solution to improve system performance is the use of a multiple-input single-output (MISO) channel which is composed of multiple antennas at the transmitter side and one antenna at the receiver side, motivated by Wittneben’s pioneering work (Wittneben, 1991). Unfortunately, no improvements in the spectral efficiency are possible with all these setups.
The Impact of MIMO Communication on Non-Frequency Selective Channels Performance
The use of SIMO/MISO techniques improves the link robustness but they are not able to increase the data rate. However, this drawback can be compensated by equipping the transmitter as well as the receiver with different antennas. The resulting MIMO channel provides the ability to improve the data rate and BER.
MIMO AND LTE 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology is a broadband system based upon TCP/IP. LTE provides significant performance improvement. A remarkable advantage is the easy integration with internet networks making the convergence between mobile and fixed simpler. MIMO systems have become a key element of LTE (Long Term Evolution) in order to achieve larger throughput and spectral efficiency. MIMO means using multiple antennas at transmitter and receiver sides and appropriate signal processing. The competitiveness of UMTS in the next years is based on the achievement of higher data-rates, low-latency and packet optimized radio access technology. This is because LTE technology is being investigated and it is still under definition and standardization. A variety of technologies, techniques and algorithms are involved in its development. LTE technology uses new multiple access schemes on the air interface: OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) in the downlink and SC-FDMA (Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access) in the uplink. Spatial multiplexing allows transmitting simultaneously different data streams through the same downlink. The number of data streams that can be transmitted in parallel over the MIMO channel is given by the minimum number of antennas at both sides, the transmitter as well as the receiver side and is finally limited by the rank of the channels matrix as it is shown below. It is remarkable that especially under frequency-selective channel conditions, spatial multiplexing techniques
makes the receivers very complex, and in order to avoid this problem it is typically combined with Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) or with Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) modulation, where the problems created by the multi-path channel can be handled efficiently. The IEEE 802.16e standard incorporates MIMO-OFDMA. The IEEE 802.11n standard, which is expected to be finalized soon, recommends MIMO-OFDM. MIMO is also planned to be used in mobile radio telephone standards such as recent 3GPP and 3GPP2 standards. In 3GPP, High-Speed Packet Access plus (HSPA+) and LTE standards use MIMO techniques to improve system performance.
MIMO SYSTEM MODEL AND QUALITY CRITERIA When considering a non-frequency selective SDM (space division multiplexing) MIMO link composed of nT transmit and nR receive antennas, the system is modeled by u = H ⋅ c + w.
(1)
In (1), u is the (nR×1) received vector, c is the (nT×1) transmitted signal vector containing the complex input symbols and w is the (nR×1) vector of the additive, white Gaussian noise (AWGN) having a variance of U R2 for both the real and imaginary parts. Furthermore, we assume that the coefficients of the (nR × nT ) channel matrix H are independently Rayleigh distributed with equal variance and that the number of transmit antennas equals the number of receive antennas. The interference between the different antenna’s data streams, which is introduced by the off-diagonal elements of the channel matrix H, requires appropriate signal processing techniques. Common strategies for separating the data streams are linear equalization at the receiver side or
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The Impact of MIMO Communication on Non-Frequency Selective Channels Performance
linear pre-equalization at the transmitter side, if channel state information is available. Unfortunately, linear equalization suffers from noise enhancement and linear pre-equalization of the transmit signal from an increase in the transmit power. Both schemes only offer poor power efficiency (Fischer, 2002). Therefore, other signal processing strategies have attracted a lot of interest. Another popular technique is based on the singular value decomposition (SVD) of the system matrix H (Haykin, 1991), which can be written as H = S ⋅ V ⋅ DH , where S and D H are unitary matrices and V is a real-valued diagonal matrix of the positive square roots of the eigenvalues of the matrix H H H that are commonly sorted in descending order. Throughout this chapter, the transpose and conjugate transpose (Hermitian) of D are denoted by DT and DH, respectively. The SDM MIMO data vector c is now multiplied by the matrix D before transmission. In turn, the receiver multiplies the received vector u by the matrix SH. Thereby neither the transmit power nor the noise power is enhanced. The overall transmission relationship is defined as . y = S H (H ⋅ D ⋅ c + w ) = V ⋅ c + w
(2)
Here, the channel matrix H is transformed into independent, non-interfering layers (multiple SISO channels) having unequal gains. Figure 1 shows the layer-specific block diagram, where refers to the layer and k to the transmitted data block. The transmitted data symbol c , k is weighted by corresponding positive square root of the eigenvalues of the matrix H H H , i.e., ξ ,k ,k is added. and finally the noise term w In general, the quality of data transmission can be informally assessed by using the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the detector’s input defined by the half vertical eye opening and the noise power per quadrature component according to
104
Figure 1. Resulting system model per MIMO layer and per transmitted data block k
=
( Half vertical eye opening)2 Noise Power
=
2
2
U A U R
, (3)
which is often used as a quality parameter (Ahrens and Lange, 2007). The relationship between the signal-to-noise ratio = U A2 / U R2 and the biterror probability evaluated for AWGN channels and M-ary Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) is given by (Kalet, 1987; Proakis, 2000)
PBER
2 1 − 1 erfc . = 2 log 2( M ) M
(4)
When applying the proposed system structure, the SVD-based equalization leads to different eye openings per activated MIMO layer and per transmitted symbol block k according to U A( , k ) = ξ , k ⋅ U s ,
(5)
where U s denotes the half-level transmit amplitude assuming M -ary QAM and ξ ,k represents the positive square roots of the eigenvalues of the matrix H H H (Figure 1). The probability density function of the layer-specific weighting factors are analyzed in Figure 2 ( nT = nR = 4 ).
The Impact of MIMO Communication on Non-Frequency Selective Channels Performance
Figure 2. PDF (probability density function) of the layer-specific amplitudes ξ = 1, 2, , 4 )
(with
by min(nT , nR ) . Therein it is worth noting that with the aid of powerful non-linear near Maximum Likelihood (ML) sphere decoders it is possible to separate nR > nT number of layers (Hanzo and Keller, 2006). The bit-error probability per MIMO layer and transmitted symbol block k after SVD is given by (Ahrens and Lange, 2007)
( , k ) BER
P
Together with the noise power per quadrature component, the SNR per MIMO layer becomes
( , k )
=
2
U A( , k ) U R2
= ξ , k
2
U s
U R2
.
(6)
expressed as (Forney et al., 1984; Kalet, 1989) 2 2 U ( M − 1). 3 s
(7)
Combining (6) and (7), the layer-specific SNR results in
( , k )
= ξ , k
Ps 3 . 2 ( M − 1) U R2
(8)
Using the parallel transmission over L ≤ min(nT , nR ) MIMO layers, the overall mean transmit power becomes Ps =
1 M
) erfc
ξ , k U s . ⋅ 2 U R
log 2( M )
(9)
The resulting average bit-error probability per transmitted symbol block k assuming different QAM constellation sizes per activated MIMO layer results in (k ) PBER =
1
∑
L ν =1
L
log 2( M ν )
∑ log (M =1
2
( , k ) ) PBER .
(10)
Considering QAM constellations, the average transmit power Ps per MIMO layer may be
Ps =
=
(
2 1−
∑
L
=1
Ps , where
When considering time-variant channel conditions, rather than an AWGN channel, the BER can be derived by considering the different transmission block SNRs. Assuming that the transmit power is uniformly distributed over the number of activated MIMO layers, i.e., Ps = Ps / L , the half-level transmit amplitude U s per activated MIMO layer results in Us =
3 Ps 2 L ( M − 1)
.
(11)
The signal-to-noise ratio per SDM MIMO data block k and MIMO-layer , defined in (6), results together with (11) in
the number of readily separable layers is limited
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The Impact of MIMO Communication on Non-Frequency Selective Channels Performance
( , k ) = ξ , k
Ps Es 3 3 = ξ , k , 2 2 L ( M − 1) U R L ( M − 1) N 0
(12)
with Ps U
2 R
Es . N0 / 2
=
(13)
Finally, the BER per activated MIMO layer and transmitted symbol block k is given by:
( , k ) BER
P
=
(
2 1−
1 M
) erfc
log 2( M )
3 ξ , k
Es . 2 L ( M − 1) N 0
(14) The resulting average bit-error probability per transmitted symbol block k assuming different QAM constellation sizes is obtained as (k ) BER
P
3 ξ , k E 2 L 1 s , erfc = ∑ 1 − 2 L ( M − 1) N R =1 M 0
(15) with L
R = ∑ log 2( M ) ,
(16)
=1
describing the number of transmitted bits per data block.
BIT- AND POWER ALLOCATION Existing bit loading and transmit power allocation techniques are often optimized for maintaining both a fixed transmit power and a fixed target bit-error rate while attempting to maximize the
106
Table 1. Investigated transmission modes transmitting 8 bit/s/Hz over non-frequency selective channels layer 1
layer 2
layer 3
layer 4
256
0
0
0
64
4
0
0
16
16
0
0
16
4
4
0
4
4
4
4
overall data-rate. The well-known water-filling technique is virtually synonymous with adaptive modulation and it is used for maximizing the overall data rate. However, delay-critical applications, such as voice or video streaming transmissions, may require a certain fixed data rate to provide an appropriate QoS (Quality of Service). For these fixed-rate applications it is desirable to design algorithms, which minimize the bit-error rate (BER) at a given fixed data rate. In order to transmit at a fixed data rate while maintaining the best possible integrity, i.e. bit-error rate, an appropriate number of MIMO layers has to be used, which depends on the specific transmission mode, as detailed in Table 1. In general, the BER per SDM MIMO data vector is dominated by the specific transmission mode and the characteristics of the singular values, resulting in different BERs for the different QAM configurations in Table 1. An optimized adaptive scheme would now use the particular transmission mode that results in the lowest BER for each SDM MIMO data vector. This would lead to different transmission modes for different SDM MIMO data vectors and a moderate signaling overhead would result. However, in order to reduce the signaling overhead further, fixed transmission modes are used in this contribution regardless of the channel quality.
The Impact of MIMO Communication on Non-Frequency Selective Channels Performance
Figure 3. Resulting system model per MIMO layer and transmitted data block k including MIMOlayer PA
( , k ) PA
=
2
( , k ) U PA 2 R
U
= p , k ⋅
3 ξ , k
Es = p , k ⋅ ( , k ) . L ( M − 1) N 0
(18)
Using (4) and (18), along with the MIMO detector’s input noise power, the resultant BER per MIMO layer and transmitted data block can be calculated according to
ADAPTIVE POWER ALLOCATION In systems, where channel state information is available at the transmitter side, the knowledge about how the symbols are attenuated by the channel can be used to adapt the transmit parameters. Power allocation can be used to balance the bit-error probabilities in the activated MIMO layers. Adaptive Power Allocation (PA) has been widely investigated in the literature (Ahrens and Lange, 2007; Krongold et al. 2000; Jang and Lee, 2003). The BER of the uncoded MIMO system is dominated by the specific layer having the smallest SNR. As a remedy, a MIMO transmit PA scheme is required for minimizing the overall BER under the constraint of a limited total MIMO transmit power. The proposed PA scheme scales the half-level transmit amplitude U s of the th
( , k ) PBER = PA
(
2 1−
1 M
) erfc
log 2( M )
3 p , k ξ , k
Es . 2 L ( M − 1) N 0
(19) Finally, the BER per data block results in (k ) BER PA
P
3 p , k ξ , k E 2 L 1 s erfc = ∑ 1 − . 2 L ( M − 1) N R =1 M 0
(20)
The aim of the forthcoming discussions is now the determination of the values
p , k for the
MIMO layer by the factor p , k . This results in
activated MIMO layers. A common strategy is to use the Lagrange multiplier method in order to find the optimal
a transmit amplitude of U s
value of
p , k for the QAM
symbol of the MIMO transmit data vector transmitted at the time k over the MIMO layer (Figure 3). Applying MIMO-layer PA, the half vertical eye opening per MIMO layer and data block k becomes ( , k ) U PA =
p , k ⋅ ξ , k ⋅ U s .
(17)
Now the signal-to-noise ratio, defined in (12), is changed to
p , k for each MIMO layer and each
data block k , which often leads to excessivecomplexity optimization problems (Ahrens and Lange, 2007). Therefore, suboptimal power allocation strategies having a lower complexity are of common interest (Ahrens and Lange, 2007; Park and Lee, 2004). A natural choice is to opt for a PA scheme, which results in an identical signal-to-noise ratio
( , k ) PA = equal
2
( , k ) U PA equal
U R2
= p , k ⋅ ( , k )
(21)
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The Impact of MIMO Communication on Non-Frequency Selective Channels Performance
for all activated MIMO layers per data block k , i.e. in ( , k ) PA = constant equal
= 1, 2, , L .
(22)
Figure 4. BER without PA when using the transmission modes introduced in Table 1 and transmitting 8 bit/s/Hz over non-frequency selective channels ( + adaptive choice of the transmission mode and ∗ optimal bitloading)
The power to be allocated to each activated MIMO layer and transmitted data block k can be shown to be calculated as follows (Ahrens and Lange, 2007): p , k =
( M − 1) ⋅ ξ , k
L L
∑
( M ν −1)
ν =1
.
(23)
ξν, k
Taking (17), (23) and (11) into account, for each symbol of the transmitted MIMO symbol vector the same half vertical eye opening of ( , k ) U PA = equal
3 Ps
p , k ⋅ ξ , k ⋅ U s =
L
2∑ ν =1
( M ν −1)
ξν , k
(24)
can be guaranteed ( = 1, , L ), i. e., ( , k ) U PA = constant equal
= 1, 2, , L . (25)
When assuming an identical detector input noise variance for each channel output symbol, the above-mentioned equal quality scenario (22) is encountered, i.e., ( , k ) PA equal
=
2 ( , k ) U PA equal
U R2
=
Es
N0
L
∑ ν =1
3 ( M ν −1)
.
(26)
ξν , k
Analysing (26) for a given SDM MIMO data block, nearly the same BER can be achieved on all activated MIMO layer. However, taking the
108
time-variant nature of the transmission channel into account, different BERs arise for different SDM MIMO data blocks. Therefore, the BER of the MIMO system is mainly dominated by the data blocks having the lowest SNR’s. In order to overcome this problem, the number of transmit or receive antennas has to be increased or coding over the different data blocks should be used (Ahrens, Kühn and Weber, 2008).
RESULTS In this contribution fixed transmission modes are used regardless of the channel quality. Assuming predefined transmission modes, a fixed data rate can be guaranteed. The obtained BER curves are depicted in Figure 4 for the different QAM constellation sizes and MIMO configurations of Table 1, when transmitting at a bandwidth efficiency of 8 bit/s/Hz within a given bandwidth. Assuming a uniform distribution of the transmit power over the number of activated MIMO layers, it turns out that not all MIMO layers have to be activated in order to achieve the best BERs. More
The Impact of MIMO Communication on Non-Frequency Selective Channels Performance
Figure 5. Probability of choosing a specific transmission mode by using optimal bit loading
explicitly, our goal is to find that specific combination of the QAM mode and the number of MIMO layers, which gives the best possible BER performance at a given fixed bit/s/Hz bandwidth efficiency. The Es / N 0 value required by each scheme at BER 10-4 was extracted from Figure 4 and the best configuration is emphasized in bold in Table 1. Allowing a low signaling overhead, an adaptive choice of the transmission modes can be carried out. Since the BER per SDM MIMO data block is dominated by the chosen transmission mode and the distribution of the singular values, the different transmission modes, as depicted in Table 1, lead to different BERs per SDM MIMO data block. An adaptive modulation scheme would now use the specific transmission mode that results in the lowest BER per SDM MIMO data block. As depicted in Figure 4, the adaptive choice of the transmission mode outperforms our fixed modes at the cost of a small signaling overhead. However, the lowest BERs can only be achieved by using bit auction procedures leading to a high signaling overhead. Analyzing the probability of choosing a specific transmission mode by using optimal bit loading, as depicted in Figure 5, it turns out that at moderate SNR only an appropriate number of MIMO layers have to be activated,
Figure 6. BER with PA (dotted line) and without PA (solid line) when using the transmission modes introduced in Table 1 and transmitting 8 bit/s/Hz over non-frequency selective channels
e.g. the (16,4,4,0) QAM configurations. The expression lg(⋅) is considered to be the short form of log10(⋅) . Surprisingly, a neglectable loss in the BER results at low SNR by using the best fixed transmission mode even though different layerspecific BERs arise. Further improvements are possible by taking the adaptive allocation of the transmit power into account. Furthermore, from Figure 6 we see that unequal PA is only effective in conjunction with the optimum number of MIMO layers. Using all MIMO layers, our PA scheme would assign much of the total transmit power to the specific symbol positions per data block having the smallest singular values and hence the overall performance would deteriorate.
IMPLEMENTATION ASPECTS The implementation of a MIMO system involves considering several issues that affects the performance of the system. In this section some implementation aspects (as hardware and algorithms) are considered. The use of efficient hardware architectures and computationally efficient algorithms
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The Impact of MIMO Communication on Non-Frequency Selective Channels Performance
are required to a real time implementation of the system. FPGA (field-programmable gate array) and DSP (digital signal processors) devices play a key role in the development of these systems where the computation exigencies are so high, as well as moderate power consumption is required. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless technology uses multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver to produce significant capacity gains over single-input single-output (SISO) systems using the same bandwidth and transmit power. It has been shown that the capacity of a MIMO system increases linearly with the number of antennas at both the transmitter as well as the receiver side in the presence of a scattering-rich environment. This will ensure that the signals at the antennas in the array are sufficiently uncorrelated with each other. This is where antenna design comes in for MIMO systems. The SVD can be implemented in different ways and on various hardware solutions and architectures. DSP are powerful devices offering high processing speed as well as additional resources for computations and some flexibility (co-processors, input/output ports, interconnectivity). FPGA devices have increased in the last years their capabilities (including speed processing and calculation resources) and functionalities while maintaining the inherent flexibility that allow building appropriate processing architectures. FPGAs have evolved from being flexible logic design platforms to signal processing and powerful engines. They are now an essential component of digital signal processing systems due to their flexibility and real-time processing capabilities. Current advances in FPGA design technology have provided high-speed processing in a compact footprint, while maintaining the flexibility and programmability capabilities of signal processing systems. FPGA devices are popular for their highspeed, intensive computing, parallelism, common reconfigurable applications as fast Fourier transform (FFT), finite impulse response (FIR) filtering and other multiply-accumulate operations.
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Although these devices have great processing capabilities, efficient algorithms are required to reduce the number of operations, computation complexity and the resources required for their implementation. The benefits are reducing the power consumption and the possibility of using cheaper devices or allowing the allocation of additional functionalities on the same device. Some research works (Benavente-Peces et al., 2008; Benavente-Peces et al., 2009) have demonstrated that the use of the CORDIC algorithm to implement the SVD decomposition is a computationally efficient solution with acceptable performance degradation. Once the channel is characterized and the SVD matrices are obtained, the information must be sent back to the transmitter in order to perform the pre-coding operation. This means that some overhead should be assumed in the communication. The channel conditions vary with time and that information is continuously updated. The updating frequency depends on the change rate in the channel parameters and must be study a priori. The use of vector quantization and other strategies may be used to diminish the overhead.
FUTURE RESEARCH Wireless MIMO systems currently are a very dynamic field of research. Therefore there are a lot of interesting topics open for further work, which can be derived from the results of this chapter: Bit and power loading for coded MIMO systems are of great practical interest as shown in (Ahrens and Kühn, 2007; Ahrens and Benavente-Peces, 2009, Ahrens and Benavente-Peces, 2009a) or (Ahrens, Kühn and Weber, 2008). Additionally, non-frequency selective MIMO links have reached a lot of research. By contrast, frequency selective MIMO links require substantial further research (Ahrens and Benavente-Peces, 2009). In addition to the currently very popular wireless MIMO systems, multiple-input multiple-
The Impact of MIMO Communication on Non-Frequency Selective Channels Performance
output channels are observed in a variety of transmission links and network parts. Currently, fixed access networks are mainly constituted of multi-pair copper cables which contain a number of wire pairs. These copper cables then by their nature compose a MIMO channel. Cables or cable binders can be treated as MIMO channels and crosstalk relations are taken into account for example by crosstalk equalization schemes (Lange and Ahrens, 2005) and they are exploited in the case of dynamic spectrum management (Kerpez, 2002; Cioffi and Mohseni, 2004), which is currently gaining a growing practical interest. Crosstalk in multi-pair copper cables has long been seen as a possible application for MIMO techniques (van Etten, 1975; Ahrens and Lange, 2009). Another important type of a fixed network medium is the optical fibre, where single- and multi-mode fibres are distinguished. In particular optical multi-mode fibres guide light of different modes: Therefore the multi-mode fibre can be interpreted as a MIMO channel. This is rarely discussed in the literature, since in almost all relevant transmission cases nowadays single-mode fibres are deployed due to their superior transmission performance. However, in case of fibre deployment over short distances (e.g. in-house networks for high data rates) the multi-mode fibre technology eventually may become more popular again (due to the cost advantages of the multi-mode fibre and the associated components compared to single-mode fibres and optical components). If in case of practical relevance - in particular in the optical fibre case - results from the currently very dynamic research on wireless and wireline MIMO techniques can be adopted and adapted to the fixed optical line problems, synergy effects and considerable improvements are expected.
CONCLUSION This chapter is focused in the analysis of MIMO systems in narrowband communications and using
fixed transmission modes. The modeling process allows describing the MIMO system as its decomposition into multiple SISO channels which defines the MIMO layers. The choice of the number of bits per symbol and the number of MIMO layers combined with the appropriate allocation of the transmit power substantially affects the performance of a MIMO system obtaining a noticeable improvement in the BER. After studying, analyzing and characterizing the uncoded system performance, it turns out that not all MIMO layers have to be activated in order to achieve the best BERs. On the other hand we must remark that MIMO systems are a key element of LTE in order to achieve larger throughput and spectral efficiency and additional analysis is required for broadband services.
REFERENCES Ahrens, A., & Benavente-Peces, C. (2009). Modulation-Mode and Power Assignment in SVD-assisted Broadband MIMO Systems. In International Conference on Wireless Information Networks and Systems (pp. 83-88), Milano, Italy, 6.-10. July. Ahrens, A., & Benavente-Peces, C. (2009a). Modulation-Mode and Power Assignment for Broadband MIMO-BICM Schemes. In IEEE 20th Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications Symposium (PIMRC), Tokio, Japan, 13.-16. September. Ahrens, A., & Kühn, V. (2007). Analysis of SVD-Aided, Iteratively Detected Spatial Division Multiplexing using EXIT Charts. In 12th International OFDM-Workshop (pp. 271-275), Hamburg, 29.-30. August. Ahrens, A., Kühn, V., & Weber, T. (2008). Iterative Detection for Spatial Multiplexing with Adaptive Power Allocation. In 7th International Conference on Source and Channel Coding, Ulm, 14.-16. January.
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Ahrens, A., Lange, C. (2007). Transmit Power Allocation in SVD Equalized Multicarrier Systems. International Journal of Electronics and Communications (pp. 51-61), 61 (1). Ahrens, A., & Lange, C. (2009). Iteratively Detected MIMO-OFDM Twisted Pair Transmission Schemes. In Communications in Computer and Information Science (pp. 281–293). Heidelberg: Springer. Alamouti, S. M. (1998). A simple Transmit Diversity Technique for Wireless Communications, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (pp. 1451-1458), 16 (8). Benavente-Peces, C., Ahrens, A., Arriero-Encinas, L., & Lange, C. (2008). Implementation Analysis of SVD for Modulation-Mode and Power Assignment in MIMO Systems. In International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks (CSN 2008). Palma de Mallorca, Spain, 01.-03. September. Benavente-Peces, C., Ahrens, A., Pardo-Martín, J. M., & Ortega-González, F. J. (2009). Fixed Point SVD Computation Error Characterization and Performance Losses in MIMO Systems. In International Conference on Wireless Information Networks and Systems (pp. 91-94), Milano, Italy, 6.-10. July. Bolcskei, H., Gesbert, D., & Paulraj, A. J. (2002). On the capacity of OFDM-based Spatial Multiplexing Systems. IEEE Transactions on Commuications (pp. 225-234), 50 (2). Bolcskei, H., & Paulraj, A. J. (2000). SpaceFrequency Coded Broadband OFDM Systems. In Proc. IEEE WCNC-2000, Chicago, IL. Cioffi, J. M., & Mohseni, M. (2004). Dynamic Spectrum Management - A Methodology for providing significantly higher Broadband Capacity to the Users. Telektronikk (pp. 126-137), 4.
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Fischer, R. F. H. (2002). Precoding and Signal Shaping for Digital Transmission. New York: John Wiley. doi:10.1002/0471439002 Forney, G.D., Gallager, R.G., Lang, G.R., Longstaff, F.M., & Qureshi, S.U. (1984). Efficient Modulation for Band-Limited Channels. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (pp. 632-647), 2 (5). Foschini, G. J. (1996). Layered space-time Architecture for Wireless Communication in a Fading Environment when using multi-element Antennas. Bell Labs Tech. Journal (pp. 41-59), autumn. Foschini, G. J., & Gans, M. J. (1998). On limits of Wireless Communications in a fading Environment when using multiple Antennas. Wireless Personal Communications (pp. 311-335), 6. Hanzo, L., & Keller, T. (2006). OFDM and MC-CDMA. New York: John Wiley. doi:10.1002/9780470031384 Haykin, S. S. (1991). Adaptive Filter Theory. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall. Hochwald, B. M., & Marzetta, T. L. (2000). Unitary space-time Modulation for multipleantenna Communications in Rayleigh at Fading. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (pp. 543-564), 46 (2). Jakes, W. C. (1974). Microwave mobile communications. New York: Wiley. Jang, J., & Lee, K.B. (2003). Transmit Power Adaptation for Multiuser OFDM Systems. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (pp. 171-178), 21(2). Kalet, I. (1987). Optimization of Linearly Equalized QAM. IEEE Transactions on Communications (pp. 1234-1236), 35(11). Kalet, I. (1989). The Multitone Channel. IEEE Transactions on Communications (pp. 119-124), 37 (2).
The Impact of MIMO Communication on Non-Frequency Selective Channels Performance
Kerpez, K. J. (2002). DSL Spectrum Management Standard. IEEE Communications Magazine (pp. 116-123). 40(11). Krongold, B.S., Ramchandran, K., & Jones, D. L. (2000). Computationally Efficient Optimal Power Allocation Algorithms for Multicarrier Communications Systems. IEEE Transactions on Communications (pp. 23-27), 48 (1).
Wittneben, A. (1991). Base Station Modulation Diversity for Digtal SIMULCAST. In: IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC-Spring), pp. 848-853 Zheng, L., Tse, D.N.T. (2003). Diversity and Multiplexing: A Fundamental Tradeoff in Multiple-Antenna Channels. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (pp. 1073-1096), 49 (5).
Kühn, V. (2006). Wireless Communications over MIMO Channels - Applications to CDMA and Multiple Antenna Systems. Chichester: Wiley. doi:10.1002/0470034602
Zhou, Z., Vucetic, B., Dohler, M., & Li, Y. (2005). MIMO Systems with Adaptive Modulation. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology (pp. 10731096), 54(3).
Lange, C., & Ahrens, A. (2005). Far-End Crosstalk Equalization in Multi-Pair Symmetric Copper Cable Transmission. In International Conference on Advances in the Internet, Processing, Systems, and Interdisciplinary Research, Pescara, Italy.
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS
LeFloch, B., Alard, M., & Berrou, C. (1995). Coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex. Proceedings of IEEE (pp. 982-996), 83(6). Park, C.S., & Lee, K.B. (2004). Transmit Power Allocation for BER Performance Improvement in Multicarrier Systems. IEEE Transactions on Communications (pp. 1658-1663), 52 (10). Proakis, J. G. (2000). Digital Communications. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Tarokh, V., Seshadri, N., & Calderbank, A. R. (1998). Space-time Codes for High Data Rate Wireless Communication: Performance Criterion and Code Construction, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (pp. 744-765), 44(2). Telatar, I. E. (1999). Capacity of multi-antenna Gaussian Channels. European Transactions on Telecommunications (pp. 585-595), 10. Van Etten, W. (1975). An Optimum Linear Receiver for Multiple Channel Digital Transmission Systems. IEEE Transactions on Communications (pp. 828-834), 23 (8).
AM (Adaptive Modulation): Adaptive Modulation refers to the capability to perform a modulation and power adjustment in the communication (wireless) system to prevent channel conditions and disturbances changing along time (known as fading). This technique increases the spectral efficiency of wireless transmission systems by adapting the signal parameters appropriately. MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output): It’s a technique used to increase channel capacity (spectral efficiency) by adapting the spatial dimension of the transmission channel. This technology incorporates at least two antennas at the transmitter side and at least two antennas at the receiver side. MIMO takes advantage from multipath to improve the system performance. PA (Power Allocation): It’s a technique used to distribute the total available power at the transmitter along the various antennas (or layers). SDM (Space Division Multiplexing): It’s a multiplexing technique in which physical separation of transmitting (antennas) is used to deliver simultaneously different data streams. SDM technique is an approach to MIMO systems and it improves capacity by increasing the number of
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The Impact of MIMO Communication on Non-Frequency Selective Channels Performance
antennas in the fading channel. The most popular algorithm is the BLAST. BLAST (Bell Laboratories Layered SpaceTime): BLAST is a spectrally efficient algorithm applied to wireless communication which uses the spatial dimension (SDM) to transmit and receive different data streams using multiple antennas. There are various improvements of this algorithm
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called V-BLAST (vertical BLAST) and D-BLAST (diagonal BLAST). Beamforming: It is a signal processing technique applied to multiple antennas system in order to obtain the required radiation pattern for each case in order to transmit most of the radiated power in a concrete direction (or directions).
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Chapter 8
Node Localization in Ad-hoc Networks Zhonghai Wang Michigan Tech University, USA Seyed (Reza) Zekavat Michigan Tech University, USA
ABSTRACT This chapter introduces node localization techniques in ad-hoc networks including received signal strength (RSS), time-of-arrival (TOA) and direction-of-arrival (DOA). Wireless channels in ad-hoc networks can be categorized as LOS and NLOS. In LOS channels, the majority of localization techniques perform properly. However, in NLOS channels, the performance of these techniques reduces. Therefore, non-line-of-sight (NLOS) identification and mitigation techniques, and localization techniques for NLOS scenarios are briefly reviewed.
I. INTRODUCTION Node localization in ad-hoc networks have emerging applications in homeland security, law enforcement, defense command and control, emergency services, and traffic alert. These systems promise to considerably reduce the society’s vulnerabilities
to catastrophic events and improve the quality of life. Typical examples include emergency 911 (E911) (Mayorga, C.L.F. et al. 2007), tracking a fire fighter (Ingram, S.J. et al. 2004), battlefield command and control (Venkatesh, S. et al. 2008), vehicle safety, etc. These techniques also help to enhance wireless routing (Stojmenovic, I. 2002), (Karimi, H.A. et al. 2001) and resource alloca-
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch008 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
Node Localization in Ad-hoc Networks
tion (Haddad, E. C. et al. 2003) performance in ad-hoc networks. In E911, the cell phone starting an emergency call is localized with an error that is in the order of 100 meters (for 95 percent of calls). In a building on fire, it is hard for fire fighters to find their position and their way out. While if fire fighters’ 3-dimentional (3-D) position can be tracked by commander or fire fighters themselves, then they can make their way out by themselves or under the commander’s guidance. In battlefield, soldiers’ position information allows commanders to maintain central command procedure. In addition, it allows them to monitor the health of soldiers, and provide support in emergency situations. Accordingly, many localization methods have been proposed. Examples include GPS (global positioning system) plus communication (Karimi, H.A. et al. 2001), received signal strength indication (RSSI) (Bulusu, N. et al. 2000), (Konrad L. et al. 2005), time-of-arrival (TOA) fusion (Goud, P. et al. 1991), time difference-of-arrival (TDOA) fusion (Gillette, M. D. et al. 2008), directionof-arrival (DOA) fusion (Girod, L. et al. 2006), (Niculescu, D. et al. 2003), joint TOA-DOA estimation (Tong, H. et al. 2007), and multi-node TOA-DOA fusion (Wang, Z. et al. 2009), etc. In all of these systems, usually two types of nodes are available: (1) Target nodes which their position should be found, and (2) Base nodes which enable finding the position of target nodes. In some techniques, such as RSSI, target nodes’ position is calculated by themselves and can be reported to base nodes. In some techniques such as TOA fusion and joint DOA-TOA estimation, base nodes are in charge of finding the position of target nodes. These systems are usually categorized as active remote positioning system, because target nodes actively contribute in the process of remote positioning. RSSI incorporates the signal strength of multiple beacon-signals generated by base nodes at the target node. Here, the base nodes are also called anchor nodes as their positions are assumed
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known. Two RSSI localization approaches have been proposed: (a) based on the communication of the anchor nodes and target nodes: If a target node communicates with an anchor node, then the target node would be in the coverage area of the anchor node. When the target node communicates with multiple anchor-nodes, the target node is localized at the centroid (Bulusu, N. et al. 2000) or weighted centroid (Shen, X. et al. 2005) of these anchor-nodes with respect to a reference point; and (b) based on mapping the measured signal strength set (signature) into a premade received signal strength map of the environment (Konrad L. et al. 2005). Here, the environment should be perfectly known, and a signal strength map should be available. Techniques that are based on range measurement consist of two categories: (a) those that measure the distances between target node and base nodes to determine multiple circles with their center at base nodes via TOA estimation (Goud, P. et al. 1991). In this case, the target node is localized at the crossing point of these circles; and (b) those that are based on measuring the range differences between pairs of base nodes and the target node (TDOA) to determine multiple hyperbolas with focal points at the two base nodes (Gillette, M. D. et al. 2008). The target node is localized at the crossing point of multiple hyperbolas. In the techniques based on angle measurement, either the angles of the target node with respect to base nodes is measured by base nodes via DOA estimation (Girod, L. et al. 2006) or the angle of base nodes (beacon nodes) with respect to the target node is measured at the target node (Niculescu, D. et al. 2003). The target node is localized at the crossing point of multiple lines determined by the base nodes position and the measured angles. In this technique, the nodes that are in charge of DOA estimation should be equipped with antenna arrays. Antenna arrays are an array of antennas, e.g., dipole antennas, which are usually located at a fixed distance from each other.
Node Localization in Ad-hoc Networks
The MDS (multidimensional scaling) localization methods (Yi, S. et al. 2004), (Jose, A. et al. 2006) computes the relative position of nodes in a system. Here, no base node is needed: the relative position of nodes in the system is attained via the distance information between nodes pairs. If multiple base nodes (or anchor nodes) are available, the localization method can be used to compute the absolute nodes position. A shortcoming of this method is its high computational complexity. Thus, it is not suitable for localizing fast moving nodes. Hybrid techniques integrate different kinds of measurements to localize targets. The measurement can be two or more of the following: range, angle and signal strength, e.g., multi-node TOADOA fusion in (Wang, Z. et al. 2009). To localize a target node, parameters such as received signal strength, distance (based on TOA), and/or DOA are measured. Next, these parameters are fused (processed) to estimate the target node’s position. The received signal is usually sensitive to the wireless channel between target nodes and base nodes. Hence, the wireless channel impacts the signal received at those nodes. In the localization process, the impact of the wireless channel should be considered. The most significant impact of wireless channel on localization is the error originated by the lack of availability of line-of-sight (LOS) between base and target nodes. If the base node does not realize that LOS scenario is not available, considerable localization error would occur in the measurement made by one or some nodes. These erroneous measurements can negatively impact the fusion results. Hence, base nodes should identify non-LOS (NLOS) situations to avoid those errors. In this case, localization techniques developed for NLOS scenarios should be implemented. Available localization techniques that are designed to deal with NLOS error can be grouped into two categories. One category finds NLOS base node and exclude them from the localization process, i.e., only use the information from LOS base nodes to localize target node (Xiong, L. 1998), (Chen, P.C. 1999). Another category uses
the statistics of measurements in NLOS scenarios to mitigate the NLOS impact on localization performance (Güvenç, I. et al. 2008), (Cong, L. et al. 2005). If LOS base nodes are not enough to perform localization or the statistics of the measurement in NLOS scenario is not available, these available techniques would not perform, and the method that directly use the measurements in NLOS is needed. An example of these techniques has been discussed in Subsection V.3. Section II introduces the wireless channel and its impact on localization performance. Section III introduces the parameter measurement and available localization techniques. Section IV compares these techniques and Section V introduces methods that discriminate LOS and NLOS, and localization methods in NLOS scenarios. Section VI concludes the chapter.
II. WIRELESS CHANNELS AND LOCALIZATION Node localization techniques developed for ad-hoc networks that are based on signal strength, range and angle are impacted by the wireless channel between base and target nodes. The wireless channel usually consists of a LOS path and multiple reflected (NLOS) paths between source and destination. Here, we assume that the transmitted signal from the source is X (t ) , and the channel between the source and the destination is linear time invariant (LTI). In addition, here, we assume the availability of an antenna array at the nodes to enable DOA estimation. It should be noted that in general wireless channels are dynamic; however, within a short time period, they can be well modeled as LTI. In other words, these channels are considered quasi-static. The impulse response of an LTI channel is modeled by K −1
h(τ ) = ∑ k =0 αk iΦ(θk )iδ(τ − τk ).
(1)
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Node Localization in Ad-hoc Networks
In Equation (1), K is the number of paths between the source and the destination, including one direct path (k = 0) and multiple reflected paths (k = 1, 2, …, K-1); ak , θk and τk are the attenuation, angle-of-arrival and the time delay of the kth path, respectively; Φ(θk ) is the corresponding array response vector determined by the receive antenna array geometry and the angle-of-arrival when an antenna array is installed at the destination, and it is taken Φ(θn ) = 1 if Omni-directional antennas are installed at the destination. Note that in Equation (1), τ 0 , τ 0 ≠ 0 , is the time delay of the LOS path; in addition, we assume τ 0 < τ1 < τ2 < < τK −1 . Ignoring the noise effect, the received signal at the destination corresponds to R(t ) = X (t ) ∗ h(t ) =
∑
K −1
a i(θk )iX (t − τk ). k =0 k
(2)
If a 0 is large enough to be detected, we categorize the channel as the LOS channel in the study of node localization. In the LOS channel, the time delay of the first detectable path corresponds to the true distance (R) between source and destination, i.e., R= c⋅τ0
(3)
In Equation (3), c is the speed of light, τ 0 is the time that the signal travels from the source to the destination. Hence, in LOS channels, the distance between source and destination can be computed by measuring the first arrival’s time delay. In LOS channel, the angle of the first detectable path ( θ0 ) is the true angle of the source with respect to the destination. Therefore, the angle of the source with respect to the destination can be calculated by measuring the angle of the first arrival.
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If a 0 is too small to be detected, the channel is categorized as NLOS. In this case, the first detectable path is from a reflector. Thus, the first arrival’s time delay and angle would be form a reflector, and accordingly the localization would involve with major error. Most localization techniques (e.g., (Bulusu, N. et al. 2000), (Goud, P. et al. 1991), (Gillette, M. D. et al. 2008), (Niculescu, D. et al. 2003), (Tong, H. et al. 2007), (Wang, Z. et al. 2009)) are designed assuming a LOS between source and destination is available. In some applications, such as open areas (e.g., desert in battlefield applications), the LOS between the transmitter and receiver is almost available in all scenarios. Thus, in these scenarios, NLOS identification is not an important issue. However, there are many other scenarios, such as in urban or indoor area, in which the probability that the LOS between the transmitter and receiver is obstructed is high. Thus, it is important to identify NLOS conditions. Many techniques have been proposed to identify NLOS scenarios (Venkatesh, S. et al. 2007), (Venkatraman, S. et al. 2002), (Wang, Z. et al. 2009) and maintain localization in NLOS scenarios (Güvenç, I. et al. 2008), (Cong, L. et al. 05). These techniques will be investigated in Section V.
III. LOCALIZATION TECHNIQUES This chapter introduces four categories of measurements for the available localization techniques in ad-hoc networks that include: (1) received signal strength (RSS), (2) Range, (3) Angle, and (4) Hybrid measurements. This section reviews the theoretical foundations of these techniques.
Node Localization in Ad-hoc Networks
III.1 Parameter Measurement in Localization In this subsection, we review the measurement techniques applied in node localization in ad-hoc networks. These techniques include received signal strength measurement, range measurement and angle measurement.
a) Received Signal Strength Measurement The received signal power ( Pr ) in a receiver at the measurement point can be calculated by Pr =
PG G t at re (4π / λ)µ
.
(4)
Where, Pt is the transmitter outage power,
Gat is the transmit antenna gain, Gar is the re-
ceiver antenna gain, Gre is the gain from antenna output to the measurement point in the receiver, d is the distance between transmitter and receiver, λ is the carrier wavelength, and µ (usually larger than 2) is the fading parameter determined by the channel. Based on Equation (4), RSS is determined by the transmitting power, transmitting and receiving antennas’ gains, the receiver structure, the distance between transmitter and receiver, the carrier wavelength and the channel fading parameter, and it is independent of the signal bandwidth. A real antenna beam pattern is not ideally Omni directional. Thus, the power in one direction might be higher than the other direction. In addition, the channels between multiple base station transmitters and the target receivers are not the same; hence, when the RSS is mapped into the distance, error may occur. RSS can be measured in the intermediate frequency (IF) stage before the IF amplifier or in the baseband signal chain before the baseband ampli-
fier in zero-IF systems. In a complex sampling system, when I and Q samples (samI and samQ) of the received signal are evaluated, the power of the received signal can be calculated using
(5)
Where E(â‹Ž) is the expectation operator and Rin is the input load. Fading effects occur because of channel variations. Thus, the received signal amplitude is not constant. To achieve a better power measurement, in practice, (assuming the signal to be a mean ergodic process), a large number of samples are collected and sample mean is applied to calculate the expectation of Equation (5).
b) TOA Measurement TOA estimation techniques are divided into two categories: round-trip and single-trip methods. Radar and wireless local positioning system (WLPS) (Tong, H. et al. 2007) apply the roundtrip method. Radar stands for RAdio Detection And Ranging. It is a device that transmits a burst of radio energy and receives its reflections from objects and processes them to detect the desired targets and find their range. In addition to detection of the target and finding its range, advanced radars are capable of extracting other information such as speed, size and nature of the target. For example they can easily discriminate a fighter jet from a Boeing 747. Radar computes the TOA of the round trip via pulse detection, and incorporates the detected TOA to find the target range. In Radar, the target does not contribute in the process of localization. Thus, radar is called a passive remote positioning system. In WLPS, a base station broadcasts a directsequence spread spectrum (DSSS) inquiry signal. When a target node receives the inquiry signal, it generates and transmits a DSSS response with a fixed and known delay back to the base node. The round-trip TOA and the know delay are incorpo-
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Node Localization in Ad-hoc Networks
rated at the base node to find the position of the target. DSSS transmission is mainly suggested for wireless environments to create path diversity at the receiver and improve its performance. Here, the target contributes in the process of positioning. Thus, WLPS is called an active target remote positioning system. GPS uses single-trip method from the satellite to the ground receivers for localization (Elliott D. Kaplan, 1996). The timings of all GPS satellites are synchronized with a clock in master control station (MCS) located at Schriever AFB in Colorado. Each satellite broadcasts ranging code and navigation data including its position and the time that the ranging code is transmitted. When a GPS receiver receives the signal from a satellite, a TOA estimation technique is applied to find the TOA of the ranging code and compare it to a local clock to find the time delay from the GPS satellite to receiver. A hybrid single trip TOA measurement technique is presented in (Fukuju, Y. et al. 2003). Here, radio frequency (RF) and ultrasonic signals are used to measure the TOA of ultrasonic signal between source and target nodes. The received RF signal enables the TOA counter and the received ultrasonic signal ends the counter. In air, the ultrasonic speed (about 340 m/s) is much lower than that of RF (about 3×108 m/s). The speed difference is applied to measure TOA. The accuracy of range measurement based on RF signal is limited by the signal bandwidth (Peebles, Peyton Z. 1998), measurement techniques, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and numberof-reflectors in the area. For a single measurement (no filtering or average method is applied) based on cross correlation similar to the one used in GPS, or based on pulse detection such as the one used in RADAR, ignoring the impact of SNR, the range resolution corresponds to P = E(
120
samI2 + samQ2 Rin
).
(6)
Where, Tres is the TOA resolution, Beff is the effective bandwidth, ρres is the range resolution and c is the light speed. Because c ≈ 3×108 m/s, if high ranging accuracy is requested (e.g., 5 meters), then higher bandwidth should be used (the required bandwidth corresponding to 5 meters is 60 MHz). A low bandwidth signal always generates low range accuracy. Note that in the hybrid RF – ultrasonic technique, the ranging accuracy is not sensitive to the RF signal bandwidth. In this hybrid system, the ranging error 1 c Tres = , Pres = . corresponds to: Beff Beff (∆ρ)
(7)
In Equation (7), V is the ultrasonic speed in air, and V = 340 m/s. ∆p = V i∆TOA. includes two parts, one is generated by RF signal and the other is generated by ultrasonic signal. If the RF signal bandwidth is 1MHz, the TOA measurement error generated by RF signal is about 1μs. The corresponding ranging error is 340m/s × 10-6 s = 0.34mm. This error is small in any ad-hoc network application and can be ignored.
c) DOA Measurement In ad-hoc networks, antenna array and electronically steerable passive array radiator (ESPAR) antennas are usually used to measure DOA, because their size is small, and they are cost effective. Reflector antennas are capable of DOA estimation as well, but their size is large and they need mechanical scanning. This limits their applications in ad-hoc networks. In a linear antenna array, delay-and-sum (DAS) (Liberti, J. C. et al. 1999), multiple signal classification (MUSIC) (Schmidt, R.O. 1986) and root-MUSIC (Barabell, A.J. 1983) are usually applied to measure DOA. In DAS, the single received by each antenna element is assigned a complex weight to change its phase. The weight is determined by the assumed DOA of the signal, antenna array parameters
Node Localization in Ad-hoc Networks
(element distance, number of elements) and the signal carrier wavelength. Then the delayed signals are summed, and its output power is calculated. When the assumed DOA matches the true one, the output power of the weighted sum reaches its maximum value. Hence, when the maximum output power of the weighted sum is observed, the corresponding assumed DOA is taken as the received signal DOA. In MUSIC, the received signal of an antenna array is modeled by ∆TOA
(8)
In (8), X is the received signal vector, A is the array vector of the antenna array determined by the DOA (θ) of the signal, antenna array parameters and the signal carrier wavelength. Antenna array parameters and the carrier wavelength are fixed; hence, A is only a function of DOA (θ). In addition, W is the received noise vector. The eigenvectors of the covariance matrix of X is calculated and the eigenvectors corresponding to the smallest eigenvalues are selected and used to construct a matrix E. Essentially, E represents the noise components. MUSIC exploits the orthogonality of noise and signal components: noise components are represented by E (matrix is denoted with bold capital letter), and the signal components received from the angle θ are represented by A(θ). Thus, MUSIC estimates the DOA of received signal by finding the peaks of the MUSIC spectrum X = A(θ)iS + W .
(9)
While the root MUSIC (Barabell, A.J. 1983) directly finds the root of the polynomial Pmu (θ) =
1 . A (θ)iEiE∗ iA(θ) ∗
(10)
Where, M is the total number of antenna eleM +1
ments, D(z ) = ∑ l =−m +1 al z −1. , al =
∑
m −n =l
Bmn
is the element on the mth row and nth column of matrix B, Bmn , E is defined in (9), and B = E × E* When the roots of the polynomial are calculated, the corresponding DOA can be calculated, for z = exp(−j 2πd sin θ / λ) . For details, see (Barabell, A.J. 1983). ESPAR antenna (Ohira, T. et al. 2001) is made by a single active element surrounded by multiple parasitic elements loaded with variable reactance. By controlling the reactance of these parasitic elements, the ESPAR antenna beamforming is implemented, and DOA is measured via electronic beam scanning. DOA estimation accuracy is a function of the technique used, the SNR, number of elements in the array, the channel structure (i.e., the availability of multiple paths), the mutual coupling between antenna elements which itself is a function of the distance between neighboring elements, and the calibration of antenna array. It should be noted that in general the RF components connected to the antenna receivers does not operate fully equivalent. Thus, the phase and amplitude of signals received through each antenna element may vary from one RF element to another. This effect can highly reduce the DOA estimation performance. DOA complexity varies with the selected method. The complexity and performance of DAS (MUSIC) is very low (high). Recently, a new fused DASMUSIC high performance and low complexity technique (suitable for ad-hoc networks) has been introduced (Zekavat, S.A. 2007).
III. 2 Localization Techniques Based on Signal Strength Measurement In the localization techniques based on signal strength measurement, anchor (reference) nodes broadcast beacon signals periodically. The position of anchor nodes is usually kept fixed or known
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Node Localization in Ad-hoc Networks
(for example by installing a GPS on them). The beacon signal includes the anchor-node ID and the power level if the nodes’ transmitting power can be controlled. Hence, the mobile target node can identify that the received signal is coming from which anchor-node and with what power. This technique can be implemented using two methods: connectivity fusion, and signature mapping. In connectivity fusion (Bulusu, N. et al. 2000), mobile target node listens to all anchor-nodes for a while. In this time period, each anchor-node broadcasts Nsent times. If the mobile target node receives Nrece times from an anchor-node, and Nrece is larger than a predetermined threshold Nthresh, then it is considered that the mobile target node is in the coverage area of the anchor-node (the mobile target node is connected with the anchornode). The coverage area of the anchor-node is in a circle centered at the anchor-node position and its radius is the maximum distance that the anchor-node and the mobile target node can communicate. When it is determined that the mobile target node is connected to multiple anchor-nodes, the mobile target node is localized at the centroid of these anchor-nodes position. For example, the mobile target node is connected to anchor-nodes 1 to L, then the target node is localized at (x, y), z = exp(−j 2πd sin θ / λ)
(11)
In (11), (x, y) is the estimated mobile target node position and (xl, yl) is the anchor-node l’s position in Cartesian coordinates. The approach introduced in (11) does not need the availability of LOS as the only important point is the capability of communication of target node and anchor nodes. Connectivity fusion does not need a priori information of the environment. But if anchor nodes are not uniformly distributed, the target node position would be biased toward the anchor node with the larger distance, because in (11), each anchor node’s position is assigned the same weight. To alleviate the biasing problem, a weighted
122
connectivity fusion is presented in (Shen, X. et al. 2005). Here, the RSS and the channel fading parameter (μ) are applied to assign fusion weight to each base node position, assuming the anchor nodes’ transmitting power is known. In this case, x=
L L 1 1 x , y = ∑ l =1 yl . ∑ l =1 l L L
(12)
In (12), Pl is the RSS of the lth anchor node at the target node, and μ is the channel fading parameter. In a rich scattering environment, NLOS reduces the accuracy of this technique. The technique presented in Equation (12) is sensitive to the availability of LOS, because if only NLOS is available, the received power, and the parameter μ in Equation (12) would change. However, the approach of Equation (12) would lead to a better performance compared to that of (11) when LOS is available. Next, we introduce signature mapping technique which needs a priori information of the environment. This technique is more suitable for indoor or urban areas where a rich scattering environment is available. In signature mapping (Konrad L. et al. 2005), a map (data base) of the environment RSS is prepared. In this map, a set of RSS (reference signature) of signals from multiple anchor-nodes (a signature) is measured at each reference point (xm, ym), m is the reference point index, and 1 ≤ m ≤ M, M is the total number of reference points. In other words, the signature (sm) of the reference point m, located at (xm, ym), corresponds to a set of RSS (RSS1,m, RSS2,m, … RSSl,m, … RSSL,m), i.e., sm = [RSS1,m RSS2,m … RSSl,m … RSSL,m]. The average of multiple measurements in a time period t at a reference point is taken as the reference signature of the reference point. One signature is shown in Figure 1. A mobile target node in the network listens to anchor-nodes’ beacon for a while (usually the same time period t that is used for shaping the RSS map is considered), then the RSS from the
Node Localization in Ad-hoc Networks
Figure 1. Signature mapping localization
number of anchor-nodes and they are uniformly distributed, using a fixed number α we can generate a reasonable accuracy. But if the number of anchor-nodes is small, and sparse, and they are not uniformly distributed in the ad-hoc network, the accuracy of this technique would be lower (the estimated target node position would be biased toward the anchor node with a larger distance). A reference signature that is the closest to the received signature can be found using x=
same anchor-node is averaged, and forms a received signature (sr = [RSS1,r RSS2,r … RSSl,r … RSSL,r]). The Manhattan distance1 or Euclidean distance2 can be applied to calculate the distance between the received signature (sr) and the reference signature (sm). If the Manhattan distance is applied, the distance between two signatures sr and sm is L
∑ x= L∑
µ
l =1 L l =1
pl x l µ
pl
L
∑ ,y = L∑
µ
l =1 L l =1
pl yl µ
pl
.
(13)
In (13), L is total number of anchor nodes in the network, RSSl,r and RSSl,m are the received signal strengths from anchor node l for the received signature and the mth reference signature, respectively. There are several ways to localize a mobile target node. A simple way is to find α (α is a predetermined number) reference signatures that are closer to the received signature than others. Then localize the mobile target node at the centroid of the positions of these reference signatures, i.e., L
d (sr , sm ) = ∑ l =1 RSSl ,r − RSSl ,m .
(14)
Where, (xm, ym) is the reference signature m’s position. In an ad-hoc network, if there are a large
a a 1 1 x , y = ∑ m =1 x m , ym . ∑ m =1 m α α
(15)
Then, a set of reference signatures that are closer to the received signature are selected for the calculation of mobile target node position. The set of close reference signatures is determined using s ∗ = arg min1≤m ≤M d (r, sm ).
(16)
In (16), c is a constant and can be empirically determined to be within 1.1 to 1.2 (Konrad L. et al. 2005). The reference signatures selection scheme in (15) enhances the localization performance by eliminating the problem of using the approach in Equation (14) which is the estimated position that is biased toward the node with the larger distance. The localization methods based on RSS measurement do not need extra hardware or complex software. The RSS can be measured in a receiver using a simple calculation. In addition, there is no requirement on the signal bandwidth, and can be easily implemented on the available protocols such as Bluetooth (Rodriguez, M. et al. 2005) and 802.11 (Harder, A. et al. 2005). The accuracy of RSSI localization depends on the number of anchor nodes (reference points), and the distance between anchor nodes (reference points). This category of localization methods would require a large number of anchor nodes (reference points) if higher accuracy is required. The signature mapping method is capable of local-
123
Node Localization in Ad-hoc Networks
izing in NLOS scenarios because the signatures in all LOS and NLOS areas are prepared in priori for a fixed position of anchor nodes.
Figure 2. TOA fusion localization
III.3 Localization Techniques Based on Range Measurement Localization techniques based on range measurement are composed of two methods. The first one is based on the measurement of the distance between mobile target node and multiple anchornodes, which is implemented via measuring TOA. Hence, we call it TOA fusion. The other is based on the measurement of the difference in the distance between mobile target node and multiple pairs of anchor-nodes, which is implemented via measuring the TDOA. Hence, we call it TDOA fusion. In both TOA and TDOA estimation techniques, it is assumed that LOS is available. In TOA fusion, the position of anchor-nodes is assumed to be known. The TOA of the signal traveling from mobile target node to anchor node (or from anchor node to mobile target node) can be directly measured using an active target node based on round-trip measurements (Tong, H. et al. 2007) or can be indirectly measured as this is the case in GPS (see details below). In general, three anchor-nodes would be required to localize a mobile target node in TOA fusion if TOA is directly measured similar to the one shown in Figure 2. When there are two anchor nodes, for example anchor node 1 and 2 in Figure 2, two circles are formed (represented by arcs 1 and 2). There are two crossing points on the two circles, one is at the target node position and the other is not. To eliminate the ambiguity, at least a third anchor node is needed, such as anchor node n in Figure 2. Based on Figure 2, the mobile target node’s position (x, y) is determined by the equation set d (r , sm ) d (r , s k )
124
≤ c.
(17)
In GPS, the TOA is indirectly measured via an extra parameter that is the user receiver’s local time tu, which is also an unknown parameter (Elliott D. Kaplan, 1996). Hence, in GPS there are four unknown parameters, the coordinate (x, y, z) of the mobile target node and the user receiver’s local time tu. Therefore, at least four equations are required to calculate these four unknown parameters. In other words, in GPS, user receivers should receive signals from at least four satellites to localize themselves. Figure 3 represents the TDOA fusion technique. In this method, the difference of the range between the target node and the pair of anchornodes (e.g., anchor nodes 1 and 2) is computed by measuring the TDOA. The calculated range difference and the two anchor nodes position determine a hyperbola (i.e., the one represented by Curve 1), and the target node is selected on the hyperbola. When three or more anchor-nodes are available, multiple hyperbolas are achievable, and the target node would be on the crossing point of these hyperbolas. In Figure 3, when the range differences (ΔR12, ΔR1n, ΔR2n) are calculated via TDOA measurement, we have
Node Localization in Ad-hoc Networks
Figure 3. TDOA fusion localization
R1 = (x 1(b ) − x )2 + (y1(b ) − y )2 , R2 = (x 2(b ) − x )2 + (y2(b ) − y )2 ,
(18)
Rn = (x n(b ) − x )2 + (yn(b ) − y )2 . In (18), the unknown parameters x and y can be calculated by solving the equation set.
III.4 Localization Techniques Based on Angle Measurement Due to the development of RF circuit and digital circuit, nowadays, smart antennas can be implemented at small scale static nodes (Hyeon, S. et al. 2009), and mobile nodes (Lucke, O. et al. 2007) in ad-hoc networks. The received signal’s DOA can be measured at these nodes that are equipped with smart antennas. There are two kinds of DOA fusion techniques. One is to measure DOA of the mobile target node at two or more anchor nodes, and then fuse these measured DOA to localize the target node. This method requires that all anchor nodes are aligned in the same direction, for example by using a compass (Niculescu, D. et al. 2003). The other DOA fusion method measures the relative DOA of two or more anchor nodes with respect to the target node’s reference direc-
tion at the mobile target node (Niculescu, D. et al. 2003), and then fuses these relative DOA to localize the target node itself. In the localization techniques based on the first kind of DOA measurement, anchor nodes are equipped with antenna arrays, and mobile target nodes are equipped with Omni directional antenna. Two or more anchor nodes measure the DOA of the mobile target node’s with respect to a direction that these anchor nodes are aligned with. The mobile target node is assumed to be on the sight lines of all anchor nodes to the mobile target node. Here, it is assumed that LOS is available. Hence, when multiple anchor nodes can observe the mobile target node, the target node is localized on the crossing point of the line of sights from anchor nodes to the target node. In Figure 4, all anchor nodes are aligned in the direction of east (i.e., x axis). Based on this figure, the target node position is determined by the equation set ∆R21 = (x 2(b ) − x )2 + (y2(b ) − y )2 , − (x 1(b ) − x )2 + (y1(b ) − y )2 , ∆Rn 1 = (x n(b ) − x )2 + (yn(b ) − y )2 − (x 1(b ) − x )2 + (y1(b ) − y )2 ,
(19)
∆Rn 2 = (x n(b ) − x )2 + (yn(b ) − y )2 − (x 2(b ) − x )2 + (y2(b ) − y )2 . In (19), θ1 = tan−1 tan
−1
y1(b ) − y
x 1(b ) − x yn(b)) − y . x n(b ) − x
, θ2 = tan−1
y2(b ) − y x 2(b ) − x
, θn =
,
θ1 and θ2 are measured angles, and θn , (x 1(b ), y1(b ) )
and (x 2(b ), y2(b ) ) are known anchor nodes’ position. Solving (19), the target node position (x, y) would be calculated.
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Node Localization in Ad-hoc Networks
Figure 4. Absolute DOA fusion localization
Figure 5. Relative DOA fusion localization
In the methods that are based on relative DOA measurement, the target nodes would be equipped with antenna arrays. Here, it is not required to install antenna array at anchor nodes. They measure the DOA of anchor nodes with respect to its reference direction (e.g., the black thick arrow line in Figure 5). The reference direction can be the base line or the bearing line of the antenna array. This line is arbitrary and no direction alignment is needed. When DOA of each anchor node is measured, we calculate (x n(b ), yn(b ) ) , α1 and α2
with respect to the x axis shown in Figure 5. In addition, α0 , α1 and α2 are the estimated anchor nodes angles with respect to the target node reference direction. Using (20), we calculate αn and α12 , which correspond to α2n
(21)
Assuming that ψ is the set of anchor nodes that can be seen by the target node, calculating y (b ) − y
y (b ) − y
Based on Figure 5, we have αn and α12 = α2 − α1 When we estimate the target node position α2n = αn − α2 , we can calculate the angles of anchor nodes with respect to the x axis (the thinner arrow line in Figure 5), which corresponds to
up to α12 , an error function can be constructed
(x , y )
(20)
αn −1 n
,
The mobile target node position (x, y) is calculated via minimizing the error in (22), which is
, is
SE = ∑ i , j ∈ψ (aij − aij )2 .
a1′ = a 0 + a1 = tan
−1
In (20), a2′ = a 0 + a2 = tan
y (b ) − y 1
x 1(b ) − x y (b ) − y −1
an′ = a 0 + an = tan
2
(b ) 2 (b ) n (b ) n
x −x −y −1 y
. x −x the offset of the target node reference direction
126
a12 = a2 − a1 = a2′ − a1′ = tan−1 a 2n = an − a 2 = an′ − a 2′ = tan
2
x 2(b ) − x y (b ) − y −1 n
x n(b ) − x
− tan−1 − tan
1 , x 1(b ) − x y (b ) − y −1 2
x 2(b ) − x
.
(22)
(23)
Equations (17) – (19) and (23) are all nonlinear equations; thus, extended Kalman filter (EKF) or linear iteration technique can be applied to find the
Node Localization in Ad-hoc Networks
solution of (17) – (19) (Elliott D. Kaplan, 1996). Equation (23) can be solved using a linear iteration technique (Niculescu, D. et al. 2003). While, EKF is a precise technique, it involves with a risk of divergence. When EKF is applied to address nonlinear equations, its divergence should be avoided, in which, considerable error is generated. To avoid divergence, all system parameters, the process and measurement noise covariance matrix should be known (Liu, H.F. et al. 2003). In addition, the initial state should be as precise as possible (Shankararaman, R. et al. 2006).
III.5 Localization Techniques Based on Hybrid Measurement Multiple types of measurements can be integrated to achieve better localization performance. Techniques that are based on the integration of multiple types of measurements are called hybrid. In hybrid TOA-RSSI (Wann, C.D. et al. 2007), RSSI and a pre-established path loss model are applied to discriminate LOS and NLOS, and generate weights for TOA measurement in TOA fusion. Larger weights are assigned to TOAs that are generated by stronger signals (e.g., those received through LOS channel). These weights are generated by RSS. Applying these weights improves the localization accuracy in severe NLOS scenarios by decreasing the NLOS impact (smaller weights are assigned to weaker signals that are more likely from NLOS channel). In hybrid DOA-RSSI (Lee, J. et al. 2008) and joint TOA-DOA estimation (Tong, H. et al. 2007), both the angle and the range of a target node with respect to a base node are calculated via DOA and TOA/RSS measurements. Accordingly, the base node would be capable of localizing target nodes independently, while in DOA or TOA fusion scenarios at least three base nodes are needed for the process of localization. It should be mentioned that whenever multiple base nodes are available, DOA and TOA information measured by multiple base nodes could be ap-
plied across those base nodes to further improve the localization accuracy (Wang, Z. et al. 2009).
III.6 Localization without Base Node All the localization techniques introduced in subsections III.2-5 require base nodes, whose position can be computed prior to the localization of target nodes. In this sub-section, we introduce the localization method based on multidimensional scaling (MDS) technique (Yi, S. et al. 2004), (Jose, A. et al. 2006). In this method, the relative position of a node with respect to other nodes is calculated using the distances between itself and its neighboring nodes. Base nodes are not necessary in this method, but if three (for 2-D localization) or more (for 3-D localization) base nodes are available, the absolute position (in the coordinate that base nodes are located) of the objective node can be calculated. It is assumed that node i is located at xi (xi=[xiyi] T ) and the distance between any pair of nodes i and j is measurable via measuring TOA. Now, the real distance between nodes i and j is (ˆ, x yˆ) = arg min(x ,y ) SE .
(24)
We represent the measurement of dij with pij. The node position is computed by minimizing the summation of the squared difference between the measured (pij) and calculated (dij) distances, i.e., dij = (x i − x j )T (x i − x j ).
(25)
In a real system, there might be one-hop and multi-hop communication, by assigning a weight (wij) to each distances difference, we achieve the weighted MDS as following. xT − xT ′ −x R ′ − xT ′
=
yT − yT ′ −yR ′ − yT ′
.
(26)
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Node Localization in Ad-hoc Networks
Table 1. Localization techniques comparison Methods based on Base node(s)
MDS
Requirement
Performance
Hardware
Software
SNR
Bandwidth
Installation
Small scale Low/High
RSS
Low
Low
Low
Low
Low/High
Range
Low
High
Low
High
Low
Angle
High
High
High
Low
Low
Low
High
Low
High
Low
In (Jose, A. et al. 2006), it is found that by assigning 1 to one-hop and ¼ to two-hop and 0 to those more than two-hop distance measurements, better localization accuracy is achievable. The localization method based on MDS does not need the availability of base nodes; hence, its installation is simpler than other methods. But it should be noted that there are multiple unknowns in the minimization process (25) and (26); hence, the computational complexity of the localization method based on MDS is much higher than those method having base nodes.
3
Large scale Low
4
High High
Low low
5
accuracy is needed, a huge map (large data base) should be made. This is a time consuming process. A computational methodology presented in (Skidmore R.R. et al. 2004) can simplify the RSS map making process by simulating the RSS in a given area when the system model is available. The system model includes:
IV. LOCALIZATION TECHNIQUES COMPARISON
1. Environment Physical Model, including transmitters’ position, buildings and furniture position, size (length, width and height), material, etc. 2. Signal Propagation Model. 3. Instruments Model, including transmitting antenna’s parameters, transmitting power, receiving antenna’s parameters, etc.
Based on the description in Section III, we can generate Table 1 to compare the localization techniques based on RSS, range and angle measurements. There are many kinds of combinations of hybrid measurements; hence, we do not compare the hybrid techniques with those based on single kind of measurement. Table 1 represents that RSSI method needs minimum requirement across all localization techniques (excluding the installation of the signature mapping method). The localization accuracy of the signature mapping is higher when a high resolution (fine grid) RSS map is created. A fine grid RSS map requires RSS measurement throughout the environment, i.e., the RSS should be measured at each grid point on the map. In a large scale application, if high localization
Using this method, an RSS map can be easily created if the accurate system model is available. But usually, we cannot attain accurate system model. If high accuracy is needed, onsite measured RSS map is still required. The installation of the connectivity fusion method only needs the availability of anchor nodes’ position, and it is much simpler. However, its localization accuracy decreases as the distance between anchor nodes increases. This technique is not suitable for applications in which anchor nodes are far away from each other. Localization techniques based on range measurement need complex ranging and localization software and high bandwidth. Its installation only needs anchor nodes position. Its accuracy is determined by the geometric dilution of precision
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(GDOP) and ranging error (Elliott D. Kaplan, 1996). GDOP is the impact of the nodes’ (including base/anchor nodes and target node) geometrical distribution on localization performance. A good anchor nodes and target nodes distribution (target nodes are surrounded by uniformly distributed anchor nodes) helps to achieve better performance like in GPS. In GPS, users are on the earth surface and the twenty four GPS satellites are uniformly distributed around the earth. The requirement of localization techniques based on angle measurement is the highest one within the three listed in Table 1. This kind of technique needs complex hardware (antenna array or ESPAR antenna) and implementation of DOA measurement and localization algorithms. As mentioned before although usually DOA estimation techniques such as MUSIC need high complexity in order to offer high performance; however, a fused DAS/MUSIC DOA technique such as the one in (Zekavat, S.A. 2007) can help reduce the complexity problem. In small scale applications, these methods can achieve high accuracy; while in large scale applications, their localization accuracy is low. The reason is that the GDOP of this kind of methods depends on angle measurement error, nodes distribution, and the distance between anchor nodes and target node (Dempster A.G. 2006). As the distance increases, the GDOP increases. The localization method based on MDS does not require the availability of base node. Its installation is much simpler than other method, but it can only provide the relative position of nodes. In the applications that absolute position is needed, base nodes are needed. A disadvantage of this method is its high computational complexity. Due to its complexity, this technique is not applicable to a system in which the relative speed of nodes is high. In NLOS scenario, the techniques discussed above usually generate considerable localization error except for the signature mapping method. While in real application, NLOS scenarios are inevitable; hence, LOS and NLOS should be
discriminated and techniques applicable in NLOS scenario should be designed.
V. LOS/NLOS DISCRIMINATION AND NLOS MITIGATION/LOCALIZATION A localization technique designed for LOS scenario would generate considerable error when LOS is not available, i.e., in NLOS scenario. The reason is that NLOS propagation increases RSS, TOA and DOA measurements errors (Güvenç, I. et al. 2008), (Li. X. 1998), and thus generates large localization error. To avoid the impact of NLOS on localization performance, a node should identify NLOS scenarios. In addition, techniques should be investigated to enable localization in NLOS scenarios. Accordingly, NLOS identification and NLOS mitigation methods have been investigated, and some NLOS localization techniques have been proposed. Here, we briefly review the available NLOS identification, NLOS mitigation, and NLOS localization techniques.
V.1 NLOS Identification To avoid the severe impact of NLOS, NLOS identification techniques have been proposed. Examples include methods based on the rootmean-squared delay spread (RDS) (Venkatesh, S. et al. 2007), the statistics of the measured range (Venkatraman, S. et al. 2002), and multi-antenna phase difference statistics (Wang, Z. et al. 2009). In the methods that are based on the RDS, the received ultra wideband (UWB) signal’s TOA and RSS are first calculated, and then the RDS is calculated and used to separate LOS and NLOS. Because UWB signal is needed, this method is not applicable to systems with wideband or narrowband signals. The method based on the statistics of the measured range, tests the normality of the measured range. If the signal is coming from LOS channel, the measured range should fall in normal or almost normal distribution; while
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if the signal is coming from NLOS channel, the measured range does not fall in normal distribution (Venkatraman, S. et al. 2002). This method involves with some latency as the full statistics of the estimated range should be computed. This requires considerable time. The method based on multi-antenna phase difference statistics applies the variance of the phase difference of the received signals from two co-installed synchronized receivers to discriminate LOS and NLOS. In NLOS conditions, the variance is large and it decreases as LOS power increases from zero. In LOS only condition, the variance is zero. A threshold based on application is selected to separate LOS and NLOS. The technique is not limited by signal bandwidth. In addition, its latency is small. In this method, only the full statistics of the received signal phase difference is needed, and that can be calculated in a within the time period that the channel remains unchanged (channel coherence time). This technique needs two co-installed synchronized receivers. However, it is a suitable technique for multi-input system applications, e.g., a smart antenna system, or the systems that are based on DOA estimation.
V.2 NLOS Mitigation The available NLOS mitigation techniques are divided into two categories. One category identifies the outliers (NLOS base nodes) and discards them, and use the information achieved via LOS base nodes’ to implement the localization (Xiong, L. 1998), (Chen, P.C. 1999). These mitigation techniques are only applicable in scenarios that the number of LOS base nodes is equal to or larger than the necessary number of base node to perform localization. In addition, the NLOS measurements are discarded, which may enhance the localization performance if used properly in the localization process. The second category is to identify NLOS base nodes and calibrate the data achieved via these NLOS base nodes using the statistics achieved in
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NLOS channel models, e.g., the TOA statistics achieved in (Alavi, B et al. 2006), and then apply the data achieved in LOS and the calibrated data captured in NLOS to implement the localization (Güvenç, I. et al. 2008), (Cong, L. et al. 2005). These methods need the statistics of the localization information (RSS, TOA or DOA) in NLOS scenario to be achieved prior to the localization. Thus, these methods are applicable to situations where a priori information is available. But in some applications such as localizing fire fighters in a burning building, the prior NLOS information might not be available. Hence, these methods cannot be applied to these applications. Accordingly, localization techniques that directly apply NLOS measurement(s) are required in scenarios that LOS base nodes are not enough to perform localization or the priori NLOS measurement statistical information is not available. This motivates our discussion in the next subsection.
V.3 Localization with NLOS Measurements In urban environments (e.g., cellular networks), the number of base nodes (base stations) is limited. In addition, in many scenarios, the LOS between base nodes and target nodes (mobile user) is abstracted by buildings and objects (Anisetti, M. et al. 2008). Thus, NLOS mitigation methods introduced in subsection V.2 are not applicable to these scenarios, as they may generate large amount of error. If a priori information of the environment is not available, the RSSI based method (e.g., the one presented in (Anisetti, M. et al. 2008)) would fail, as well. In these scenarios, methods that directly apply the NLOS measurements are needed. One solution based on bidirectional TOADOA measurement is presented in (Seow, C.K. et al. 2008). In this method, antenna arrays are equipped with both base and target nodes; geometrical NLOS identification is applied to determine whether LOS channel is available and find which pairs of TOA-DOA measurements are
Node Localization in Ad-hoc Networks
coming from the same reflector (shared reflector) in NLOS channel. In NLOS channel, if two or more shared reflectors are available, the target node can be localized at the crossing point of multiple lines that are constructed with the TOADOA measurement pairs as shown in Figure 6. In Figure 6, the line T′TB′′ is constructed with the NLOS TOA-DOA measurement pair x i,i ∈{1,,M } = mini, j ∈{1,,M } wij (dij − pij )2 . a n d (R1(BT ), θ1(BT ) ) . The position of point T′ in the base node’s local coordinate is determined by the measurement (R1(TB ), θ1(TB ) ) . In the rectangular coordinate, it is (R1(BT ), θ1(BT ) )
(27)
The position of point B′ in the target node’s local rectangular coordinate is xT = R1(BT ) icos(θ1(BT ) ), yT = R1(BT ) isin(θ1(BT ) ). (28) The quadrangle BB’TB’’ is a parallelogram; thus, the position of B’’ in the base node B’s local coordinate is: x B ′ = R1(TB ) icos(θ1(TB ) ), yB ′ = R1(TB ) isin(θ1(TB ) ). (29) With the positions of points T’ and B’’, the function determining the line T′TB′′ is calculated by x B ′′ = −x B ′′ , yB ′′ = −yB ′′ .
(30)
When multiple shared reflectors are available, we can achieve a set of functions that determine multiple lines on which the target node T is localized. Solving the set of functions, the target node is localized in the base node’s local coordinate. NLOS localization is still an important issue in ad-hoc networks node localization. Research
Figure 6. Localization with NLOS measurements
should be conducted to enable single measurement NLOS identification. The methods that do not rely on priori information and enable direct localization using NLOS measurements should receive more attention.
VI. CONCLUSION This chapter introduces localization techniques that are applicable to ad-hoc networks. We reviewed wireless channels in ad-hoc networks. The basic theory of various localization techniques was presented and compared. We also introduced NLOS identification techniques and study the impact of NLOS on localization performance. In addition, some recent NLOS mitigation techniques were introduced.
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Stojmenovic, I. (2002, July). Position-based routing in ad hoc networks. Communication Magazine, IEEE, 40(7), 128–134. doi:10.1109/ MCOM.2002.1018018 Tong, H., & Zekavat, S. A. (2007, May). A Novel Wireless Local Positioning System via a Merger of DS-CDMA and Beamforming: Probabilityof-Detection Performance Analysis under Array Perturbations. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 56(3), 1307–1320. doi:10.1109/ TVT.2007.895499 Venkatesh, S., & Buehrer, R. M. (2007). Nonline-of-sight identification in ultra-wideband systems based on received signal statistics. IET Microwaves. Antennas & Propagation, 1(6), 1120–1130. Venkatesh, S., & Buehrer, R. M. (2008). Multiple-access insights from bounds on sensor localization. Elsevier Journal on Pervasive and Mobile Computing, 4(1), 33–61. doi:10.1016/j. pmcj.2007.09.003
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Node Localization in Ad-hoc Networks
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS
ENDNOTES
Node Localization: Finding node position in a coordinate or a system. RSSI: Received signal strength indication. TOA Fusion: Processing TOA (range) information to localize target node. DOA Fusion: Processing DOA (angle) information to localize target node. Multi-Node TOA-DOA Fusion: Localizing target node by processing multiple range (TOA) and angle (DOA) information. Multidimensional Scaling: Finding nodes’ relative position in a system with single kind of measurement, e.g., range measurement, in which no base node is needed. NLOS Identification: Identifying the data (e.g., TOA, DOA) is captured through LOS or NLOS wireless channel. NLOS Mitigation: Mitigating the severe localization error generated by the data achieved through NLOS channel. NLOS Localization: Localizing target node directly using NLOS measurements without severe NLOS error.
1
2
3
4
5
Manhattan distance is the distance between two points measured along axes at right angles. If there are two points at (x1, y1, z1) and (x2, y2, z2), the corresponding Manhattan distance is |x1 - x2| + |y1 - y2|+ |z1 - z2|. Euclidean distance is the ordinary distance between two points. If there are two points at (x1, y1, z1) and (x2, y2, z2), the corresponding Euclidean distance is xT − xT ′ y − yT ′ . = T −x R ′ − xT ′ −yR ′ − yT ′ Low installation requirement corresponds to the connectivity fusion, in which, only anchor nodes position should be available before implementation, no RSS map is needed. The high installation requirement corresponds to the signature mapping method, in which, an RSS map should be made before implementation. Low performance is applied to connectivity fusion, and high performance is applied to signature mapping. Here we say it low, because only relative node position is available.
135
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Chapter 9
Wireless and Mobile Technologies Improving Diabetes Self-Management Eirik Årsand Norwegian Centre for Integrate, Norway Naoe Tatara Norwegian Centre for Integrated Care and Telemedicine, Norway Gunnar Hartvigsen University of Tromsø, Norway
ABSTRACT The technological revolution that has created a vast health problem due to a drastic change in lifestyle also holds great potential for individuals to take better care of their own health. This is the focus of the presented overview of current applications, and prospects for future research and innovations. The presented overview and the main goals of the systems included are to utilize information and communication technologies (ICT) as aids in self-management of individual health challenges, for the disease Diabetes, both for Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. People with diabetes are generally as mobile as the rest of the population, and should have access to mobile technologies for managing their disease. Fortyseven relevant studies and prototypes of mobile, diabetes-specific self-management tools meeting our inclusion criteria have been identified; 27 publicly available products and services, nine relevant patent applications, and 31 examples of other disease-related mobile self-management systems are included to provide a broader overview of the state of the art. Finally, the reviewed systems are compared, and future research directions are suggested.
INTRODUCTION Type 1 diabetes, also called insulin-dependent diabetes, is typically diagnosed in people under 30 DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch009
years of age. In this type, the pancreas has stopped producing insulin, so that the patient needs insulin injections. In Type 2 diabetes, which is typically diagnosed in people over 40 years of age, the body stops responding correctly to the insulin produced by the pancreas. This type constitutes
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Wireless and Mobile Technologies Improving Diabetes Self-Management
more than 90% of diabetes cases, and treatment includes oral medication, dietary changes, increased physical activity, and sometimes insulin injections. Self-management of blood glucose can help to reduce long-term complications of diabetes. Important self-management strategies include healthy eating habits, physical activity, and appropriate medication. Long-term effects of diabetes include progressive development of retinopathy with potential blindness, nephropathy that may lead to renal failure and/or neuropathy with risk of foot ulcers, amputations, sexual dysfunction and substantially increased risk of cardiovascular diseases. Most of the existing self-management tools for chronically ill patients are designed to provide help through interaction with health care workers. Even though this is usually the kind of help that patients want most and that is also the most effective, e.g. (Calfas et al., 2002), (Martinson et al., 2008) and (Shishko, Mokhort, & Garmaev, 2006), it is resource-intensive. A specific change of focus expressed by the European Commission (EC) a few years ago in the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme (European Commission, 2005) was to orient R&D towards one process to integrate and use all relevant biomedical information for improving health knowledge and processes related to prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and personalization of health care. We first give an overview of mobile diabetesspecific self-management systems and tools, including publicly available systems, prototypes typically designed for research studies, and relevant patents and patent applications. Then, some systems for other chronic diseases are presented – but more briefly, in order to illustrate how technology is applied within the personalized health area in general. The objective of this chapter is to provide updated information about how mobile and wireless technologies are currently used in the context of eHealth, to describe the usability of the technologies in relation to people with a chronic disease such as diabetes, and to suggest
sound future directions for coming technologies that support mobile self-management.
BACKGROUND A search for patient-operated diabetes management software in general, including PC/Internet tools, shows that there are many systems available. No recently updated reviews were found, but a six-year-old study (Park & Daly, 2003) identified 47 Web-based or Windows-based programs for assisting people with diabetes in their self-help regimen, excluding educational and informational software. Few reviews of mobile diabetes systems were found. A search of the Cochrane Reviews database in June 2009 using the search words “diabetes” and “mobile” in all text fields yielded no relevant reviews, but some results with the status “Stage: Protocol”. Besides the review by Tatara, Årsand, Nilsen, and Hartvigsen (2009), two more general reviews covering the use of SMS in healthcare by Krishna, Boren, and Balas (2009) and Fjeldsoe, Marshall, and Miller (2009) were found, identifying some additional diabetesspecific mobile systems. Systems for and studies on self-management tools involving assistance by health care personnel are widespread, e.g. the DiasNet advisory system (Dinesen & Andersen, 2006), the system developed by Axon TeleHealthCare (PA Business, 2008), the telephone-linked care system (Glanz et al., 2002), the PARIS_Diabtel system (Rigla et al., 2006), the TeleObe programme (Schiel, Beltschikow, Radon, & Kramer, 2006), the Internet-based system BioDang (Kwon et al., 2004), and the Healthcare@Home monitoring framework (Subramanian et al., 2008). Our focus is however on patient-operated mobile self-management tools, an area that has exhibited relatively strong growth during the last three years, but is still rather immature. The main reason for the recent growth may be the evolution of mobile phones into small, programmable and function-
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rich computers. Several studies and prototypes as well as some publicly available products and services exist, directed at people with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, but few of these can actually be classified as self-management tools according to our definition: tools designed for personalized and patient-oriented use. This unfortunately means that despite the possibilities that the mobile terminals, miniaturization and wireless communication technologies provide, there are still relatively few efforts to create mobile systems intended for personalized use.
•
•
• • •
STATE OF THE ART: MOBILE SELFMANAGEMENT DIABETES SYSTEMS The state of the art in wireless and mobile technologies to improve diabetes self-management was explored by searching literature databases, searching the Internet, and searching patent databases.
Coverage in Scientific Publications To explore the extent to which mobile selfmanagement diabetes systems are addressed in scientific publications, peer-reviewed journals or conference papers were searched for combinations of the words “diabetes”, “mobile”, “PDA”, and “cellular”, mainly in the same data sources as used in Tatara et al. (2009); i.e. PsycINFO, EMBASE, CINAHL, Pubmed (includes MEDLINE, which includes JMIR), Cochrane Library, ISI Web of Science, INSPEC (Ovid), ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore. In addition, the ISI Web of Knowledge, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), and the American Diabetes Association journals were searched. More relevant literature was found by checking the references of the identified relevant papers. The search was performed in May and June 2009, and the relevant tools, projects and trials that were identified are listed in Table 1. The inclusion criteria were:
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mobile, patient-operated, self-help tools (in the general sense of the term) for people with diabetes systems suitable for use outside hospitals for fairly long periods, typically more than a month inclusion of an evaluation or a description of the system systems tested on at least one patient innovative diabetes self-help systems, including those without functions for management of blood glucose measurements (in contrast to the criteria for the systems included in Table 2, where the systems had to include at least functionality for blood glucose parameters)
The system may or may not involve interaction with the health care sector. We emphasize that there are many self-management systems for diabetes that are Web- and PC-based, as well as artificial pancreas systems, which are used only in hospitals, and are therefore not included in this section.
Publicly Available Systems There exist various relevant products and other publicly available systems, some of which are listed in Table 2. The systems were found by searching for prototype names, cooperative partners and companies mentioned in the cited literature listed in Table 1. Perhaps the best online overview of diabetes management software and systems in general is provided at David Mendosa’s website: www.mendosa.com/software.htm, which has also served as a source for finding the publicly available products and services listed in Table 2. The main criteria for inclusion were that the systems: • •
were mobile (usually based on mobile phones or PDAs); were publicly available;
Wireless and Mobile Technologies Improving Diabetes Self-Management
Table 1. Relevant studies and prototypes of mobile, diabetes-specific self-management tools, ↜sorted by the year of publication No.
Main disease
Name of tool, project and/or trial (year of publication)
No. of users*
Reference
1.
Type 1 diabetes
CARDS: Computerized Automated Reminder Diabetes System (SMS, e-mail) (2009)
22
(Hanauer, Wentzell, Laffel, & Laffel, 2009)
2.
Diabetes, type not reported
Using Zigbee and mobile phones for elderly patients (2009)
17
(H. J. Lee et al., 2009)
3.
Type 1 diabetes
The Diabetes Interactive Diary (DID) (2009)
41
(Rossi et al., 2009)
4.
Type 1 diabetes
Wireless Personal Assistant for telemedical diabetes care (2009)
10
(García-Sáeza et al., 2009)
5.
Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes
Evaluation of a mobile phone telemonitoring system for glycaemic control in patients with diabetes (2009)
72
(Istepanian et al., 2009)
6.
Type 2 diabetes
Mobile communication using a mobile phone with a glucometer (HealthPia) for glucose control – comparison with Internet-based glucose monitoring (2009)
38
(Cho, Lee, Lim, Kwon, & Yoon, 2009)
7.
Type 2 diabetes
Intervention study on the WellDoc’s Diabetes Manager system (Mobile phone and Web) (2009)
185
(C. Quinn et al., 2009)
8.
Type 2 diabetes
User-Involved Design of Mobile Self-Help Tools for People with Diabetes (Mobile phone) (2009)
12
(Årsand, Tatara, Østengen, & Hartvigsen, 2010)
9.
Type 2 diabetes
A short message service by cellular phone in type 2 diabetic patients (2008)
25
(Yoon & Kim, 2008)
10.
Type 2 diabetes
WellDoc: Mobile Diabetes Management (Mobile phone and PC) (2008)
15
(C. C. Quinn et al., 2008)
11.
Type 2 diabetes
Nurse intervention using SMS and Internet (PC) (2008)
18
(S. I. Kim & Kim, 2008)
12.
Type 2 diabetes
The NICHE pilot study (mobile phone and Internet) (2008)
15
(Faridi et al., 2008)
13.
Type 2 diabetes
Continuous glucose monitoring to change physical activity behavior (CGMS monitor, accelerometers) (2008)
27
(Allen, Fain, Braun, & Chipkin, 2008)
14.
Type 1 diabetes
Mobile Phones Assisting With Health Self-Care: a Diabetes Case Study (2008)
11
(Preuveneers & Berbers, 2008)
15.
Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes
MAHI (Mobile Access to Health Information) (2008)
25
(Mamykina, Mynatt, Davidson, & Greenblatt, 2008)
16.
Type 1 diabetes
The INCA System (PDA-based patient intervention, study prior to closed-loop test) (2008)
10
(Enrique J. Gomez et al., 2008)
17.
Diabetes and cardiovascular disease
MediNet: Personalizing the Self-Care Process for Patients with Diabetes and Cardiovascular Disease Using Mobile Telephony (2008)
Initial tests only
18.
Type 1 diabetes
Diab-Memory: Mobile Phone–Based Data Service for Functional Insulin Treatment of Type 1 Diabetes (2007)
10
(Kollmann, Riedl, Kastner, Schreier, & Ludvik, 2007)
19.
Type 1 diabetes
The HealthPia GlucoPack Diabetes (mobile) Phone (2007)
10
(Carroll, Marrero, & Downs, 2007)
20.
Type 1 diabetes
Using cellular phones (the GlucoNet system) in type 1 diabetic patients during insulin pump therapy: the PumpNet study (2007)
30
(Benhamou et al., 2007)
21.
Diabetes and other chronic diseases
MyMobileDoc - a Mobile Medical Application for the Management of Chronic Diseases (2007)
15
(Nischelwitzer, Pintoffl, Loss, & Holzinger, 2007)
22.
Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes
Combining digital photography and glucose data (2007)
7
(Smith, Frost, Albayrak, & Sudhakar, 2007)
(P. Mohan, Marin, Sultan, & Deen, 2008), (Permanand Mohan & Sultan, 2009)
continued on the following page
139
Wireless and Mobile Technologies Improving Diabetes Self-Management
Table 1. continued No.
Main disease
Name of tool, project and/or trial (year of publication)
No. of users*
Reference
23.
Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes
The ProWellness Self-Care System - Information technology supporting diabetes self-care (2007)
9
(Halkoaho, Kavllo, & Pietila, 2007)
24.
Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, and other diseases
The Singapore health services experience (SMS and Internet/ PC) (2007)
n/a
(Seng et al., 2007)
25.
Type 1 diabetes
Recording of hypoglycaemic attacks. (SMS, Internet/PC and diary) (2007)
19
(Tasker, Gibson, Franklin, Gregor, & Greene, 2007)
26.
Type 1 diabetes
DiasNet Mobile (based on the DiasNet system) (2007)
1
(Jensen & Larsen, 2007)
27.
Type 2 diabetes
The CenTexNet Study: PDA Use in Diabetes Self-Care (“Diabetes Pilot” software) (2007)
42
(Forjuoh et al., 2007)
28.
Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes
Mobile Dietary Management Support Technologies for People with Diabetes (2007)
6
(Årsand, Tufano, Ralston, & Hjortdahl, 2008)
29.
Type 2 diabetes
Usability of a Mobile Self-Help Tool for People with Diabetes: the Easy Health Diary (2007)
32
(Årsand, Varmedal, & Hartvigsen, 2007)
30.
Type 1 diabetes
Sweet Talk: Text Messaging Support for Intensive Insulin Therapy for Young People with Diabetes (2006)
64
(Franklin, Waller, Pagliari, & Greene, 2003), (Franklin, Waller, Pagliari, & Greene, 2006)
31.
Type 1 and 2, visually impaired
eDiab: monitoring, assisting and educating people with diabetes (PDA or mobile phone) (2006)
n/a
(Fernandez-Luque et al., 2006)
32.
Type 1 diabetes
VIE-DIAB: reporting blood glucose, carbo-hydrate intake, insulin dosage) via mobile phone (2006)
36
(Rami, Popow, Horn, Waldhoer, & Schober, 2006)
33.
Type 1 diabetes
DiasNet-PN (based on the DiasNet system) (2006)
1
(Jensen, Pedersen, & Larsen, 2006)
34.
Type 1 diabetes
The telematic communication GlucoBeep system (2006)
20
(Jansa et al., 2006)
35.
Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes
Diabetic e-Management System (DEMS) (2006)
13
(Lutes, Chang, & Baggili, 2006)
36.
Type 1 diabetes
Diabetes education via mobile text messaging (2006)
11
(Wangberg, Årsand, & Andersson, 2006)
37.
Type 1 diabetes
Parent-Child Interaction Using a Mobile and Wireless System for Blood Glucose Monitoring (2005, 2007)
15
(Gammon et al., 2005), (Årsand, Andersson, & Hartvigsen, 2007)
38.
Type 1 diabetes
A real-time, mobile phone-based telemedicine system to support young adults with type 1 diabetes (2005)
93
(Farmer, Gibson, Hayton et al., 2005), (Farmer, Gibson, Dudley et al., 2005)
39.
Not specified
Mobile phone text messaging (SMS) in the management of diabetes (2004)
23
(Ferrer-Roca, Cardenas, DiazCardama, & Pulido, 2004)
40.
Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes
DiabNet: integration of handheld computer, mobile phone and Internet access (2004)
n/a
(Roudsari, Zhao, & Carson, 2004)
41.
Type 1 diabetes
The DAILY (Daily Automated Intensive Log for Youth) Trial: A Wireless, Portable System to Improve Adherence and Glycemic Control in Youth with Diabetes (2004)
40
(Kumar, 2004), (Kumar, Wentzell, Mikkelsen, Pentland, & Laffel, 2004)
42.
Type 1 diabetes
Cellular phone transfer for blood glucose self -monitoring – the WellMate system (2004)
100
(Vähätalo, Virtamo, Viikari, & Rönnemaa, 2004)
continued on the following page
140
Wireless and Mobile Technologies Improving Diabetes Self-Management
Table 1. continued No.
Name of tool, project and/or trial (year of publication)
Main disease
No. of users*
Reference
43.
Type 1 diabetes
Edutainment Tools for Initial Education of Type-1 Diabetes Mellitus: Initial Diabetes Education with Fun (2004)
58
(Aoki et al., 2004)
44.
Type 1, Type 2 and Gestational diabetes
The M²DM project, includes automatic generation of reminders and alarms, transmitted by SMS to patients (2003, 2006)
38
(Bellazzi et al., 2003), (Larizza et al., 2006)
45.
Type 1 diabetes
DiaBetNet: a handheld computer (guessing) game for young diabetics (blood glucose, carbs., insulin) (2003, 2004)
40
(Lane, 2003), (Pentland, 2004)
46.
Type 1 diabetes
DIABTel: evaluation of a Telemedicine system (PC and palmtop computer) (2002)
10
(E.J. Gomez et al., 2002)
47.
Not specified
Diabetes Monitoring System (DMS) based on a hand-held, touch-screen electronic diary (meals, blood glucose) (2001)
19
(Tsang et al., 2001)
* The number of users represents those who used the technology, not the total cohort, i.e. control groups are not counted.
• •
had at least a function to monitor blood glucose values, and provided more help or information than ordinary blood glucose meters.
However, there are many small applications, typically developed in student projects and made publicly available, which not were included in this overview. Blood glucose monitors (BGM) communicating with insulin pumps were also excluded, due to their generally limited circulation among people with diabetes. The search was done in May and June 2009.
Relevant Patents and Patent Applications For an overview of relevant systems filed in patent databases, searches were performed (June 2009) in the US-based patent database “Patentstorm” (PatentStorm LLC, 2009), which claims to be updated weekly with the U.S. Patent Office’s databases, and in the European patent database “esp@ cenet” (European Patent Office, 2009) (worldwide search). A mobile diabetes self-management tool might be considered too rich in functionality to allow filing of a patent. To provide further indications of whether this was the case, several patent searches were performed.
Diabetes, Mobile and Handheld: Searching Patentstorm using the criterion “diabetes and mobile” in the patent’s ‘Title’ field yielded no results, but the esp@cenet search found two (Henry, 2005),(Schildt, Franke, Kirmse, & Leitzmann, 2003). Both of these describe a remote monitoring system between a user with diabetes and the health care system or a database. Searching the same two patent databases using the search term “diabetes and handheld” in the ‘Title’ field returned no results in Patentstorm and two results in esp@ cenet. One of these concerned a pen-type injector and the other a device containing nutritional information. Full text searches for “Diabetes and Mobile and Patient-Operated”: A search in the patent databases’ ‘Full text’ field was expected to return very many more results, so more specific search terms were tested. The Patentstorm and esp@cenet had different search functionality for long search terms, so that we had to formulate the respective searches in two different ways. Patentstorm allowed long search terms in the ‘Full text’ field. A search for the criterion “diabetes and mobile and (self-help or self-management) and (tool or device or unit)” returned no patents. The shorter term “diabetes and mobile and patient-operated” returned 21 patents or patent applications. Most of these involved either “remote patient monitoring”,
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Wireless and Mobile Technologies Improving Diabetes Self-Management
Table 2. Relevant and publicly available mobile diabetes-specific self-management systems No.
Main disease
1.
Systems for both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, or not specified
Name of vendor / product
URL
t+ Medical / t+ Diabetes
http://www.tplusmedical.co.uk/ information/01Patients--04tplus_diabetes.html
SugarStats LLC / SugarStats Mobile edition
http://www.sugarstats.com/
Digital Altitudes LLC / Diabetes Pilot
http://www.diabetespilot.com/
FutureWare / Personal GlucoseTracker
http://www.futurewaredc.com/products/FutureWare_PersonalGlucoseTracker.html
5.
Alive Technologies / Alive Diabetes Management System
http://www.alivetec.com/products.htm
6.
SINOVO Ltd. & Co. KG / SiDiary
http://www.sidiary.org/
7.
Diabetech LP / GlucoMON
http://mygluco.com/glucomonhowitworks
8.
HealthEngage / HealthEngage
http://www.healthengage.com/
9.
SymCare Personalized Health Solutions / SymCare
http://www.symcare.com/
2. 3. 4.
10.
MYLEstone Health / Glucose Buddy
http://beta.glucosebuddy.com/
11.
Ace t&t / DiabGo
http://www.ace-tt.com/
Elardo GbR / Elardo DiabetesProfiler
http://www.handango.com/catalog/ProductDetails.jsp?storeId=2218&productId=87853
13.
Mobile Diabetic Inc. / LogbookFX Diabetic Diary
http://www.mdiabetic.com/
14.
Glucose-Charter / Glucose-Charter Pro
http://glucose-charter.com/
GlucoControl / GlucoControl 3.0
http://www.brothersoft.com/glucocontrol-27960. html
16.
GlucoTools / GlucoTools
http://glucotools.sourceforge.net/
17.
UTS / UTS Diabetes
http://utracksys.com/software-diabetes/
18.
HMM Diagnostics GmbH / smartLAB genie
http://www.smartlab.org/genie/
19.
Confidant Inc. / CONFIDANT Diabetes Solution
http://www.confidantinc.com/
20.
Entra Health Systems Ltd / myglucohealth
http://www.myglucohealth.net/
21.
Apple Inc. / iPhone Diabetes applications (60 applications were found by searching iTunes for “Diabetes”, of which 16 supported manual input of BG data)
http://www.apple.com/no/ipodtouch/appstore
22.
GlucoseOne / GlucoseOne Palm Application
http://www.glucoseone.com/
23.
Polymap Wireless / The Polytel System
https://www.polymapwireless.com/
24.
LifeScan Inc. / OneTouch UltraSmart
http://www.lifescan.com/
HealthPia USA / GlucoPhone
http://healthpia.us/
Insulet Corporation / OmniPod with Personal Diabetes Manager
http://www.myomnipod.com/
WellDoc Communications / DiabetesManager
http://www.welldoc-communications.com/
12.
15.
25.
Juvenile diabetes (Type 1)
26.
Insulin dep. diabetes
27.
Type 2
or remote data storage or forwarding to a health care system. An interesting concept described in the patent application by Dicks et al. (Dicks, Kent, Tripp, Bartlett, & Crosley, 2008) from 2008 presents a smart way (introducing an additional device) to trigger automatic data transmission
142
from a medical device. It actually also exemplifies the use of the system using a blood glucose monitor device ((Dicks et al., 2008), Figure 4). A search in Patentstorm for “diabetes and mobile” alone returned 14275 results. The esp@ cenet database allows searches of the “abstract”
Wireless and Mobile Technologies Improving Diabetes Self-Management
and the “title” fields together as the option most similar to free text search, with a maximum of five keywords. Searching for the term “diabetes and mobile and patient-operated” yielded no results. Searching for the term “diabetes and mobile” returned 15 results. Of these, (Rao, Rao, & Rao, 2008),(Patel, Istoc, Lin, & Narang, 2008),(Rosen, 2007),(Ichikawa, 2006),(Henry, 2005),(Schildt et al., 2003) were relevant, and involved remote data monitoring, which might be relevant in future if self-management systems become more closely integrated with health care services.
Other Health Related Mobile Self-Management Systems Fitness: For fitness and physical activity purposes, a variety of mobile devices and plans for utilization of existing devices is available, e.g.: 1. the “TripleBeat” system (Oliver & FloresMangas, 2006); 2. the chest belt systems from Polar (Polar Electro Oy, 2008); 3. the “Nike+ SportBand” (Nike Inc., 2008); 4. the “Forerunner 301” system (Garmin Ltd., 2008); 5. the “PmEB” mobile-phone application for monitoring caloric balance (G. Lee, Tsai, Griswold, Raab, & Patrick, 2006); 6. the “Affective Diary” (Ståhl, Höök, Svensson, Taylor, & Combetto, 2009); 7. the “SenseWear” armband from BodyMedia (BodyMedia Inc., 2009); and 8. the “Mobile Health Diary” (Alpesh Tarapara Aristocrats, 2008). Heart Related: Generally, heart diseases involve more immediate risks than the various kinds of diabetes and other lifestyle-related diseases. The use of technology for this disease case reflects this: usually, the sensors are constantly active, and communication to health care actors is involved. Some examples are:
1. the electrocardiogram (ECG) sensor from Alive Technologies in combination with a smartphone (Lim, Chen, Ho, Tin, & Sankaranarayanan, 2007); 2. the ECG-sensor concept described by Fensli, Gunnarson, and Gundersen (2005); 3. the system based on mobile phones and pulse monitoring described by Lee, Hsiao, Chen, and Liu (2006); 4. the “eHit Health Gateway” proposed by Holopainen, Galbiati, and Voutilainen (2007); and 5. the “Wellness Diary” (Nokia, 2008). Asthma is a chronic disease which is generally treated by avoiding the things that trigger asthma attacks and taking one or more asthma medications. It sometimes involves use of a peak expiratory meter (PEF), and treatment varies from person to person. Examples of mobile systems and studies related to this disease include the following: 1. the mobile phone-based monitoring system for self-management of asthma described by Pinnock, Slack, Pagliari, Price, and Sheikh (2007); 2. the study by Ryan, Cobern, Wheeler, Price, and Tarassenko (2005), which also describes a system linking a mobile phone to an electronic spirometer/peak flow meter; 3. the Web-based mobile asthma management system (H. R. Lee, Yoo, Jung, Kwon, & Hong, 2005); and 4. the asthma management application for children and teens (Boland, 2007). Smoking: There are currently few studies that address use of tailored mobile self-help tools in smoking cessation. Some however describe use of the standard, built-in functionalities of mobile phones, typically SMS or MMS (multimedia messages), e.g.:
143
Wireless and Mobile Technologies Improving Diabetes Self-Management
1. the study of Rodgers et al. (2005); 2. the study described by Blake (2008); 3. the prototype text-messaging program and a Web-based program described by Riley, Obermayer, and Jean-Mary (2008); 4. smoking cessation counselling in a lowincome, HIV-positive population (Lazev, Vidrine, Arduino, & Gritz, 2004); 5. the concept of sending multimedia messages described by Whittaker et al. (2008); and 6. t h e mobile phone-based “QuitSmokingMobile” (QSM) application (QuitSmokingMobile.com, 2009). Other areas: 1. Mental health: e.g. the “Mobile Mood Diary” (Trinity College Dublin, 2008); 2. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD): e.g. in the study described by Liu et al. (2008); 3. Cancer: e.g. for managing chemotherapyassociated side effects (Weaver et al., 2007); 4. Obesity: e.g. the TMS system (Morak et al., 2008), the Sensorphone system (Vlaskamp et al., 2007), and two SMS systems for overweight users (Patrick et al., 2009) and (Gerber, Stolley, Thompson, Sharp, & Fitzgibbon, 2009); 5. Eating disorders: e.g. the use of SMS as a therapeutic intervention (Hazelwood, 2008); 6. Dementia: the GSM- and GPS-based mobile “rescue locator” (Lin, Chiu, Hsiao, Lee, & Tsai, 2006); 7. Epilepsy: the PDA-based application for reporting side effects of treatment (Frings et al., 2008); and 8. Elderly people and healthcare in general: e.g. a mobile phone-based system for helping people with early dementia with everyday activities, described by Donnelly, Nugent, Craig, Passmore, and Mulvenna (2008), and the mobile medication adherence system
144
“SIMpill” (SIMpill, 2009), which sends SMS reminders about patients’ medication.
COMPARISON OF THE REVIEWED SYSTEMS Table 3 below shows the degree of completion and ease of use for the most function-rich systems for diabetes self-management with regard to the three cornerstone elements: healthy diet, blood glucose management, and exercise. The main criteria for including the systems in this comparison were that the systems were mobile (usually based on a mobile phone or PDA) and had at least the functionality to monitor blood glucose values. The systems included are mainly publicly available systems from Table 2, but there are also some relevant and promising prototypes from Table 1, indicated by “prototype” in the first column. Patents are not included in this comparison since they are more general and less concrete, contain no reference to clinical evaluations, and have restricted or no availability. As Table 3 shows, we found no systems that included all three cornerstone elements among the applications that are publicly available. The “MDoctor” (K. Kim et al., 2006) system is very similar to the “Few Touch” application (Årsand, 2009) in functionality, but little information about this system was found. The “Few Touch” application comprises fully automatic transfer of blood glucose data and step count data, and a system for recording food habits by only two touches on the mobile phone. The “Diabetes Interactive Diary” (Rossi et al., 2009) also looks promising in terms of functionality, but regarding usability it seems to be based on manual data input for most parameters. The “LogbookFX Diabetic Diary” (Mobile Diabetic Inc, 2009), the “SiDiary” (SINOVO Ltd. & Co. KG, 2009), the “WellDoc DiabetesManager“ (WellDoc Inc, 2007), and the “smartLAB genie” (HMM Diagnostics GmbH, 2008) were the publicly available systems that were closest in functionality, with automatic wire-
Wireless and Mobile Technologies Improving Diabetes Self-Management
Table 3. Diabetes-related functionalities included in function-rich mobile self-management systems Systems / Functions ↓→
BGM
Physical activity
Nutrition
Usability issues
Few Touch application (Årsand, 2009) (prototype)
X
X
X
Automatic wireless transmission of BG data and step-count data to mobile phone
MDoctor for DM (K. Kim, Han, Lee, Kim, & Ahn, 2006) (prototype)
X
X
X
“Full automatic recording of blood-glucose and exercise data”.
The Diabetes Interactive Diary (DID) (Rossi et al., 2009) (prototype)
X
X
X
“Automatic storage of blood glucose measurements”, manual physical activity registration.
LogbookFX Diabetic Diary (Mobile Diabetic Inc, 2009)
X
-
X
Wireless transmission of BG data.
SiDiary (SINOVO Ltd. & Co. KG, 2009)
X
-
X
Automatic wireless transmission of BG data to phone and desktop.
DiabetesManager (WellDoc Inc, 2007)
X
-
X
Automatic wireless transmission of BG data to health care web site.
smartLAB genie (HMM Diagnostics GmbH, 2008)
X
X
X
Automatic wireless transmission of BG data to mobile phone or computer.
OneTouch UltraSmart (LifeScan Inc., 2009)
X
X
X
A BGM with options for recording food and exercise data by using predefined choices using its keypad.
SymCare, the In-Touch Diabetes system (SymCare Personalized Health Solutions, 2009)
X
-
-
Automatic wireless transmission of BG data to health care web site.
The Polytel System (Polymap Wireless, 2008)
X
-
-
Automatic wireless transmission of BG data to phone and server.
Alive Diabetes Management System (Alive Technologies Pty. Ltd., 2009)
X
-
-
Automatic wireless transmission of BG data to health care web site or others.
GlucoMON (Diabetech LP, 2008)
X
-
-
Automatic wireless trans-mission of BG data to remote caregivers (manually initiated).
GlucoPhone (HealthPia USA, 2008)
X
-
-
Automatic wireless transmission of BG data to health care web site or others.
myglucohealth (Entra Health Systems, 2009)
X
-
-
Automatic wireless transmission of BG data to mobile phone or computer.
t+ Diabetes (t+ Medical, 2007)
X
X
X
Wirelessly transferred BG data, but manually initiated. Manual entry of other data.
Personal Assistant (García-Sáeza et al., 2009) (prototype)
X
-
X
Wirelessly transferred BG data, but manually initiated.
CONFIDANT Diabetes Solution (Confidant International LLC, 2007)
X
-
-
Wirelessly transferred BG data, but manually initiated, to mobile phone and remote server.
OmniPod with Personal Diabetes Manager (Insulet Corporation, 2009)
X
-
X
Blood glucose (CGM), food planning and insulin delivery in one unit.
Glucose Buddy (MYLEstone Health, 2009)
X
X
X
Manually initiated data transfer from phone to desktop.
Elardo DiabetesProfiler (Mündlein & Koch, 2007)
X
X
X
Manual entry of data, manually initiated data transfer from PDA to desktop.
Personal GlucoseTracker (Palm/Handspring companion program) (FutureWare, 2009)
X
-
-
Manually initiated data transfer from desktop to phone.
SugarStats Mobile Edition (SugarStats LLC, 2009)
X
X
X
Manual entry of data.
DiabGo (Ace t&t, 2009)
X
X
X
Manual entry of data.
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Wireless and Mobile Technologies Improving Diabetes Self-Management
less transmission of blood glucose data. The blood glucose monitor “OneTouch UltraSmart” (LifeScan Inc., 2009) has predefined choices for recording food, exercise, medication and other health data, using the BGM’s keypad and menus. However, the operation of this system requires much manual entry using the keypad and it does not seem to be widely used. The Personal Assistant prototype (García-Sáeza et al., 2009) is rich in functions including insulin recording, and physical activity can be recorded as a general parameter, but its mobile terminal needs charging each 12 hours.
CONCLUSION Most of the mobile phone-based self-management solutions either use the very simple functionalities such as SMS, or more content-rich functionalities such as pictures and illustrations managed by the MMS services or mobile Web. A major problem with some of these solutions is that the data must be manually recorded using small keypads or softkeys or a stylus on the small touch-sensitive mobile-phone screen. Fragmented functionality is available across a variety of systems, but it is hard to find solutions incorporating sensors, analysis, feedback, and general information in a holistic way. Bluetooth as a short-range communication standard is spreading rapidly, but as long as the Medical Device Profile for Bluetooth (Bluetooth SIG, 2007) is not fully established, the sensor connections are neither easy enough to implement, nor adequately standardized. However, recent advances such as Microsoft´s HealthVault offer solutions for connecting various medical sensors to an online patient diary (Microsoft Corporation, 2009). Even though the typical mobile self-management system is designed to be used for secondary prevention, i.e. on people who have already been diagnosed with the disease, research shows that lifestyle intervention can also prevent conditions
146
such as Type 2 diabetes in high-risk subjects (Tuomilehto et al., 2001). In future plans, one should therefore consider use of such systems for primary prevention as well as secondary prevention. Many of the diabetes-related systems presented may be used also on heart disease patients, for obese patients, for fitness purposes, and even on children with various chronic diseases. People with a high risk of developing diseases such as diabetes or various kinds of heart diseases could for example use only the physical activity module and the nutrition habit registration module of some of applications presented. Future efforts should address whether and how mobile self-management systems could form part of the health care system, and how such systems can be designed to offer peer-feedback functionalities. There is also a vast medical research potential if these data are made available in databases for data mining and refined analysis. Sound algorithms for processing and presentation of data both for patients and for their health care helpers will further enhance the value of these systems. Mobile self-management systems will be even more valuable when implantable sensors become more common, accurate, and safe to use. Sensor systems will then be easier to use, making it more likely that patients will accept the total concept, e.g. using a mobile phone as their patient terminal. We strongly agree with the conclusion of Ballegaard, Hansen, and Kyng (2008) that healthcare technology involves much more than informing clinicians; it is also about supporting the collaboration between patients and clinicians – and we expect that wireless and mobile technologies will play an important role.
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SINOVO Ltd. & Co. KG. (2009). SiDiary - Version 5. Retrieved 14. May, 2009, from http:// www.sidiary.org/ Smith, B. K., Frost, J., Albayrak, M., & Sudhakar, R. (2007). Integrating glucometers and digital photography as experience capture tools to enhance patient understanding and communication of diabetes self-management practices. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 11(4), 273–286. doi:10.1007/s00779-006-0087-2 Ståhl, A., Höök, K., Svensson, M., Taylor, A. S., & Combetto, M. (2009). Experiencing the Affective Diary. Journal of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 13(5), 365–378. doi:10.1007/ s00779-008-0202-7 Subramanian, M., & Conley, C. E., F.Rana, O., Hardisty, A., Ali, A. S., Luzio, S., et al. (2008). Novel Sensor Technology Integration For Outcome-Based Risk Analysis In Diabetes [Electronic Version]. Healthcare@Home Webpage. Retrieved 25. May 2009, from http://www.healthcareathome. info/publications.html SugarStats LLC. (2009). SugarStats’ homepage. Retrieved 13. May, 2009, from http://www.sugarstats.com/ SymCare Personalized Health Solutions. (2009). SymCare Homepage. Retrieved 14. May, 2009, from http://www.symcare.com/ t+ Medical. (2007). Information for Customers t+ diabetes. Retrieved 16. May, 2009, from http:// www.tplusmedical.co.uk/information/01Patients-04tplus_diabetes.html Tasker, A. P. B., Gibson, L., Franklin, V., Gregor, P., & Greene, S. (2007). What is the frequency of symptomatic mild hypoglycemia in type 1 diabetes in the young?: assessment by novel mobile phone technology and computer-based interviewing. Pediatric Diabetes, 8(1), 15–20. doi:10.1111/j.1399-5448.2006.00220.x
Tatara, N., Årsand, E., Nilsen, H., & Hartvigsen, G. (2009, February 1-7, 2009). A Review of Mobile Terminal-Based Applications for SelfManagement of Patients with Diabetes. Paper presented at the 2009 International Conference on eHealth, Telemedicine, and Social Medicine (eTELEMED 2009), Cancun, Mexico. Trinity College Dublin. (2008). Mobile Mood Diary. Retrieved 16. July, 2009, from https:// www.cs.tcd.ie/TMH/project/mobile-mood-diary Tsang, M. W., Mok, M., Kam, G., Jung, M., Tang, A., & Chan, U. (2001). Improvement in diabetes control with a monitoring system based on a hand-held, touch-screen electronic diary. Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, 7(1), 47–50. doi:10.1258/1357633011936138 Tuomilehto, J., Lindstrom, J., Eriksson, J. G., Valle, T. T., Hamalainen, H., & Ilanne-Parikka, P. (2001). Prevention of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus by Changes in Lifestyle among Subjects with Impaired Glucose Tolerance. The New England Journal of Medicine, 344(18), 1343–1350. doi:10.1056/NEJM200105033441801 Vähätalo, M., Virtamo, H., Viikari, J., & Rönnemaa, T. (2004). Cellular phone transferred self blood glucose monitoring: prerequisites for positive outcome. Practical Diabetes International, 21(5), 192–194. doi:10.1002/pdi.642 Vlaskamp, F., Childs, R., Lemmens, B., Nelissen, H., Arnoldussen, E., & Soede, T. (2007). SensorPhone: Mobile Telephone Based Activity Monitoring System In J. M. A. Gorka Eizmendi, Gerald Craddock (Ed.), Challenges for Assistive Technology (Vol. 20): IOS Press. Wangberg, S. C., Årsand, E., & Andersson, N. (2006). Diabetes Education via Mobile Text Messaging. Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, 12(Suppl. 1), 55–56. doi:10.1258/135763306777978515
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Weaver, A., Young, A. M., Rowntree, J., Townsend, N., Pearson, S., & Smith, J. (2007). Application of mobile phone technology for managing chemotherapy-associated side-effects. Annals of Oncology, 18(11), 1887–1892. doi:10.1093/ annonc/mdm354 WellDoc Inc. (2007). WellDoc Homepage. Retrieved 15. May, 2009, from http://www.welldoccommunications.com/ Whittaker, R., Maddison, R., McRobbie, H., Bullen, C., Denny, S., Dorey, E., et al. (2008). A Multimedia Mobile Phone–Based Youth Smoking Cessation Intervention: Findings From Content Development and Piloting Studies [Electronic Version]. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 10, e49. Retrieved 8. June 2009, from http://www. jmir.org/2008/5/e49 Yoon, K.-H., & Kim, H.-S. (2008). A short message service by cellular phone in type 2 diabetic patients for 12 months. Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice, 79(2), 256–261. doi:10.1016/j. diabres.2007.09.007
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS BGM: Blood Glucose Monitor, a sensor device for testing the concentration of glucose in the blood. Diabetes: A disease called Diabetes mellitus, a condition where the body either does not produce enough, or does not properly respond to the hormone insulin produced in the pancreas. eHealth: A recent term for healthcare practice which is supported by electronic processes and communication ICT: Information and Communication Technologies, a broad range of technologies, methods for communication and techniques for storing and processing information. Self-Management: Ways that people with different chronic health problems help themselves. Medical Sensor System: A system in which sensor(s) are integrated in an application for a medical purpose. Wireless Short-Range Communication: technologies that enable data and voice communication between both mobile and stationary devices.
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Chapter 10
Adaptive Multicarrier Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum Combined with Channel Coding Othman Sidek Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia Abid Yahya Universiti Malaysia Perlis, Malaysia Farid Ghani Universiti Malaysia Perlis, Malaysia R. Badlishah Ahmad Universiti Malaysia Perlis, Malaysia M. F. M. Salleh Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia
ABSTRACT This chapter presents an adaptive Multicarrier Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (MCFH-SS) system employing proposed Quasi Cyclic Low Density Parity Check (QC-LDPC) codes instead of the conventional LDPC codes. A new technique for constructing the QC-LDPC codes based on row division method is proposed. The new codes offer more flexibility in terms of girth, code rates and codeword length. Moreover, a new scheme for channel prediction in MCFH-SS system is also proposed. The technique adaptively estimates the channel conditions and eliminates the need for the system to transmit a request message prior to transmitting the packet data. The proposed adaptive MCFH-SS system uses PN sequences to spread out frequency spectrum, reduce the power spectral density and minimize the jammer effects. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch010 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
Adaptive Multicarrier Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum Combined with Channel Coding
INTRODUCTION The frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) system with partial band interference requires appropriate combination of spread spectrum modulation, error correcting codes, diversity technique and decoding method in order to enhance the signal transmission (Berlekamp, 1980). The combination of a diversity technique and forward error correction codes for FHSS communications system offers the most reliable means of crossing the partial-band noise jammer (Berlekamp, 1980). In FHSS technique the transmission bandwidth W Hertz is divided into q non-overlapping frequency slots. After the signal is modulated to an intermediate frequency, the carrier frequency is hopped periodically according to some predesignated code (a pseudo-random sequence) (Don, 2005; Simon et al., 1995). A patent Hedy Lamarr and music composer George Antheil (Don, 2005) for a “Secret Communication System,” in 1942, is based on the frequency hopping concept, with the keys on a piano representing the different frequencies and frequency shifts used in music. In that year, the technology could not be realized for a practical implementation. Lemarr and Antheil incurred a patent for their idea soon after the expiry of the original patent. Then the U.S applied the FHSS technique for military communication systems onboard ships (Hoffman, 2002).The use of FHSS systems has then increased dramatically since 1962. The benefit of a frequency hopping signal is that it intercepts resistant. This feature is extensively used in military communications where the risk of signal jamming or intercept is higher. Nowadays, it is used in the mobile communication industry as a multiple access technique. The frequency hopping communication systems are utilized to handle high capacity data in an urban setting (Don, 2005; Simon et al., 1995). Frequency hopping communication systems play an important role in military communications strategy. FH communication systems offer an enhancement in the per-
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formance when subjected by hostile interference. FH communication systems also reduce the ability of a hostile observer to receive and demodulate the communications signal. FH communication systems are susceptible to a number of jamming threats, such as noise jammers and narrowband, single or multitone jammers. If all frequency hops are to be jammed, the jammer has to divide its power over the entire hop band. Thus, it needs to lower the amount of the received jamming power at each hop frequency. Unfortunately, if the tone jamming signal has a significant power advantage, reliable communications will not be possible, even when the jamming tones experience fading (Robertson and Sheltry, 1996; Katsoulis and Robertson, 1997). If the FH signal has an ample hop range, received jamming power will be negligible. If a tone jammer is concentrated on a particular portion of the FH bandwidth, its power may adversely impact communications. A likely anti-jamming strategy is used as a narrow bandstop filter to remove the tone from the received signal spectrum (Don, 2005). Another method based on the undecimated wavelet packet transform (UWPT) isolates the narrowband interference using frequency shifts to confine it to one transform subband (Perez et al., 2002). This technique is a robust to avoid interference and is suitable for FHSS systems.
Frequency Hopping Over Direct Spread Spectrum The fundamental difference between direct spread Pseudonoise (PN) and frequency hop is that the instantaneous bandwidth and the spread bandwidth are identical for a direct spread PN system. While for a frequency hop system the spread bandwidth can be and is typically far greater than the instantaneous bandwidth. For the frequency hop system, all the anti-jamming (AJ) systems processing gain depends upon the number of available frequency slots. The spread bandwidth is generally equal to the frequency excursion from the lowest available
Adaptive Multicarrier Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum Combined with Channel Coding
frequency slot to the highest available frequency slot. The instantaneous bandwidth, in turn, is determined by the hopping rate or symbol rate, whichever is greater. For the direct spread PN system, the spread bandwidth is limited to the instantaneous bandwidth or the rate at which the PN sequence is clocked. Theodore (2001) at Virginia Tech conducts a research project comparing the effects of interference on wireless LANs using Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) and FHSS technology with the 802.11 and 802.11b standards. The experimental results prove that FHSS is superior to DSSS in high interference settings. Experimental analysis shows that DSSS systems are suffered a performance degradation of 27-45% while FHSS systems are degraded only by 7-8%. The following characteristics show that FHSS overcomes DSSS (Baer, 1992; Cheun and Stark, 1995; Hoffman, 2002; Spasojevic et al., 2000). •
•
• • •
•
Throughput: Point-to-point throughput is variable between both DSSS and FHSS products. Protocols for DSSS throughput sacrifice mobility and roaming performance, but FHSS provides greater power, signal efficiency, mobility, and immunity from multipath interference. Interception: DSSS data is easier to intercept than FHSS data. Constant hopping of FHSS signals make it less susceptible to interception and interference. Power: FHSS radios use less power than DSSS. Efficiency: FHSS can provide up to four times more network capacity than DSSS. Mobility: FHSS products provide better mobility, are smaller, lighter, and consume less power. Unlike DSSS, FHSS incorporates roaming without sacrificing throughput and scalability. Immunity from Multipath Interference: Multipath interference is caused by signals that bounce off from the walls, doors, or
other objects so that signals arrive at the destination at different time. This problem is automatically avoided by FHSS. FHSS simply hops to a different frequency whenever the channel is attenuated. DSSS however, is not capable of overcoming this effect.
Low Density Parity Check Codes LDPC codes were neglected for a long time since their computational complexity for the hardware technology was high. LDPC codes have acquired considerable attention due to its near-capacity error execution and powerful channel coding technique with an adequately long codeword length (MacKay, 1999). LDPC codes have several advantages over Turbo codes. In the decoding of Turbo code it is difficult to apply parallelism due to the sequential nature of the decoding algorithm, while in LDPC decoding can be accomplished with a high degree of parallelism to attain a very high decoding throughput. LDPC codes do not need a long interleaver, which usually causes a large delay in turbo codes. LDPC codes can be constructed directly for a desired code rate. In case of turbo codes, which are based on Convolutional codes, require other methods such as puncturing to acquire the desired rate. DPC codes are in the category of linear codes. They cater near capacity performance on a large data transmission and storage channels. LDPC codes are rendered with probabilistic encoding and decoding algorithms. LDPC codes are designated by a parity check Hmatrix comprising largely 0’s and has a low density of 1’s. More precisely, LDPC codes have very few 1’s in each row and column with large minimum distance. In specific, a (N,j,k) low-density code is a code of block length N and source block length k. The number of parity checks is delimitated as m=N-k. The parity check matrix weight (number of ones in each column or row) or LDPC codes can be either regular or irregular. LDPC can be regular
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if the number of ones is constant in each column or row and gets irregular with a variable number of ones in each column or row. A regular LDPC code is a linear block code whose parity-check matrix H constitutes exactly J1’s in each column 1’s in each row, with and exactly k = j N m the code rate R = 1 − j . k There is a demand to design and develop LDPC codes over a wide range of rates and lengths with efficient performance and reduced hardware complexity. Properly-designed LDPC codes execute very close to the Shannon’s theoretical limit and lower design complexity of the encoder and decoder. In view of this, LDPC codes are being projected as the channel coding solution for future modern digital communication systems. Quasi-Cyclic LDPC codes form a large class of codes with nice encoding and decoding properties, these have been comprehensively premeditated in the sense that their hardware is both cheap and easy to implement. Since both encoding and decoding require less memory, these codes have many advantages for hardware and software implementations. This memory advantage is catered by being able to illustrate the matrices employing a series of short polynomials. In this work, the new QC-LDPC codes flexible in terms of large girth, code rates and codeword length are developed. The method is derived from the basic idea of Bit-Filling (BF) and Progressive Edge-Growth (PEG) algorithms as proposed by Campello et al. (2001) and Hu et al. (2001) respectively. In order to keep the row weight to be dependent on the group size, the weight of any column or row is forced to be not smaller than 2 (greater or equal 2). In addition, a new scheme is also developed for determining the degree of variable-nodes distribution which affects the error correcting performance. Both spread spectrum methods carry large volumes of data, but FHSS is superior. FHSS is a very robust technology, it is scalable, mobile,
( )
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secure, can accommodate overlapping networks, resistance to interference, and with little influence from noises, reflections, other radio stations or other environment factors(Cheun and Stark, 1995; Hoffman, 2002). Furthermore, the number of simultaneously active systems in the same geographic area is considerably higher than the equivalent number for DSSS systems. There have been limited research efforts to date, that incorporate FHSS system with LPDC channel coding scheme. It is revealed from the work (Deo, 1974; Gallager, 1963; Tanner, 1981; Mackay, 1999) that LDPC codes can be used as the alternative to Turbo codes for forward error correction scheme in FHSS system. This work employs MCFH-SS system, since the use of fast frequency hopping (FFH) system may not be feasible for high data rate systems, due to its high speed requirements. The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the design of new QCLDPC codes. This section discusses the new codes in terms of girth, code rates and codeword length. Section 3 describes the design and development of the system employing MCFH-SS together with channel prediction scheme in order to set up the wireless modules, and to make them perform for communication. This section discusses how the PN sequences are used to spread out frequency spectrum, reduce the power spectral density and minimize the jammer effects. While in Section 4, overall proposed system setup and hardware implementation is presented. Conclusion is drawn in section 5. Glossary is provided at the end of chapter.
PROPOSED METHOD FOR GENERATING QC-LDPC CODES The BF algorithm designs a LDPC code by connecting rows and columns of a code one at a time without violating the girth condition. In the BF algorithm, the number of row connections is almost
Adaptive Multicarrier Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum Combined with Channel Coding
uniformly distributed by first selecting randomly the rows with the least number of connections. The resultant codes are either having a fixed row or fixed column weight. The structure of the row-column connections in the BF algorithm is, therefore, almost random and hence increases the complexity of the decoder. In order to simplify the hardware implementation, the BF algorithm must be modified to incorporate some form of structured decoder interconnections. In the proposed algorithm, the restructuring of the interconnections is developed by splitting the rows into sub rows. Such a division reduces the hardware complexity. The proposed algorithm for the construction of the new QC-LDPC (N,j,k) code is as described in the following steps: The codeword can be encoded as follows: mod 2(Η ×C T ) = 0
(1.1)
where H represents parity check matrix and C denotes codeword. For an efficient encoding the codeword’s rows are splitted into sub rows with respect to group size. C = (b, p1, p2 .. … pk )
(1.2)
where b and p represent the information and parity check bits respectively. The constraint of group’s number on row weight size persists the row-column (RC) connections to generate variety of codes. k
ψ = ∑ i =1 χ
(1.3)
where, Ψ represents group size and χ stands for number of row. In each sub row the number of 1-component is selected in order to maintain the concentrated degree of distribution which results in random selection. Otherwise non-concentrated degree of distribution will appear. H Z cir H H cir HQC= cir Z H cir I 1 I n Hcir= I n j −1
H cir Z Z H cir Z H cir
H cir H cir H cir
H cir Z Z Z Z H cir (1.4)
… I mk −1 I mk −1n j −1
(1.5)
where I ij = δij for i=1,2…m and j=1,2..n 0 fori ≠ j δij = 1fori = j
(1.6)
0A … 0A 0A 0A Z A = (1.7) 0A 0A A p×pHQC array is obtained from the aforesaid equations, where Hcir is the permutation matrix with the location vector of the field elements, cyclically shifting codeword by one position. Therefore, each row of Hcir is obtained from shifting the rows of the identity matrix to the left. Hence Hcir is p×p
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Adaptive Multicarrier Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum Combined with Channel Coding
Figure 1. Proposed QC-LDPC codes formation
circulant permutation matrix and HQC is p×p array of p×p circulant permutation matrix.
(b) Store shift values of the submatrices (c) UNION (‘rows’)
5. Computing the Eigenvalues of submatrix with respect to Eigenvector.
Referring to the above steps, the following facts are deduced;
Let the submatrix B=cir{b}, where b is the row vector in HQC, b= (b0,b1,……,bp-1)
1. Since HQC is p×p array of permutation and zero matrices, so no odd number of columns can be added to a zero column. The null space of HQC gives a (N,j,k) QC-LDPC codes, rate at least (k-j)/kwhich ignore zero matrix on the main diagonal of HQC. 2. Check nodes are used to form a cyclic graph which is then transformed to a parity-check matrix. Adopting the Algebraic method of Wang, et al., (2008) in determining the girth upper bounds and also finding the code dimensions in a graph given a base matrix for QC-LDPC codes. 3. The proposed QC-LDPC codes structure for more than two groups is shown in Figure 1. I and Ιsft are p×p identity and shifted submatrices, where 0 is p×p zero submatrix. The complexity of directing within groups computes on the transposition employed to connect rows and columns between groups. This modifies handling, when messages are communicated between functioning nodes.
p p det Β = ∏ ∑ γ iqbi q =0 i =0
(1.8)
For each integer q, 0≤q≤p-1, where γ represents the primitive pth root of unity. Let Eigenvalue λ4â‹‹HQC be the transpose of the row vector 1 (1, γ q , γ 2q ,...γ ( p−1)q ) , then the Eigenvector Ψ4 p = bo + γ qb1 + + γ ( p−1)qbp−1 . After matrix calculation it shows that λ4 is an Eigenvalue of B with Eigenvector Ψ4. Thus Equation (1.8) can be concluded as; p
det Β = ∏ λq q =0
(1.9)
It can be stated that Ψ4 is an Eigenvector corresponding to the Eigenvalue λ4 . 6. Select the rows and (a) Find the row with the least distance
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Adaptive Multicarrier Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum Combined with Channel Coding
Figure 2. (a) Transmitter and (b) Receiver of MCFH-SS system with LDPC Encoder and Decoder
MULTICARRIER FREQUENCY HOPPING SPREAD SPECTRUM MODEL The proposed adaptive MCFH-SS system block diagram is shown in Figure 4. The transmitter consists of LDPC encoder, inverse fast Fourier Transform (IFFT), channel interleaver, DPSK modulator and RF oscillator. The reverse opera-
tions are applicable at the receiver, except with the additional employment of a coherent detector. Referring to Figure 2, the transmitter initially sends a test packet to receiver prior to transmitting the rest of the packets. If the test packet is readable at receiver, that particular channel will be employed. Otherwise, the channel is considered to be unsuitable and is to be avoided. When the system is subjected to interference, then several test packets are sent over different channels in
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Adaptive Multicarrier Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum Combined with Channel Coding
Figure 3. Flowchart of adaptive channel prediction
order to find the good one. This selection process is handled by the channel prediction algorithm as mentioned in the following Section 3.1.
Adaptive Channel Prediction Scheme The performance of the MCFH-SS system can be enhanced by incorporating the adaptive channel prediction scheme to the system. This means the MCFH-SS system responds to the noise and fading by avoiding the channel that is unfit for
164
communication. Usually, a channel is banned only after it has been used to transmit data, which results in retransmission. The principle of blocking the poor channels is based on the prospect that these channels will remain in poor condition for transmission in quite some time. However, the banned channels may fit inadequately to the actual noise and fading. In a severe condition, the system may end up employing the low quality channels regularly and would ban the good ones too frequently and disturbs the performance. Apparently, it is attractive
Adaptive Multicarrier Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum Combined with Channel Coding
Figure 4. Frequency and subband division of the proposed MCFH-SS system
to mitigate such undesirable consequences. If the system is designed in such a way that it attempts to forecast and ignore the poor channels, better performance can be incurred. This furnishes the need for attempting to forecast the quality of channels. In order to predict the fit channels the system transmits short test packets on channels. If the test packet arrives is readable, the channel will be occupied with a Pseudonoise (PN) code and use for transmission or else, it will be banned.
h
The channel prediction algorithm flow chart is shown in Figure 3 and explains as in the following steps: The probability of a poor channel p must be fixed. P = ∑ p(b0 i, bq ) i =1
q= number of test packets/channel test h= hopping table b= maximum number of packets in the receiver buffer b0= actual number of packets in the receiver buffer Determine the Value function for each possible channel test.
{
}
Eh ,q (b) = min P S + e −rT Eh ,q (b0 )
The Algorithm
h
where the parameters,
(1.10)
(1.11)
where, Eh ,q (b)represents the Value function, the other parameters are mentioned as; q= number of test packets/channel test h= hopping table b= maximum number of packets in the receiver buffer b0= actual number of packets in the receiver buffer
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Adaptive Multicarrier Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum Combined with Channel Coding
S= stochastic variable e-rT=discount factor, and 0≤γ≤1 3. Following step 2, check the receive buffer size and the number of best possible extra packets. 4. If all the q tested channels are poor, it is proposed that the radio shall simply use the next untested channel from the hopping table to transmit the frame. 5. Block the ready-to-use channels with PN code in order to keep them off from intentional and unintentional jammers. 6. Updates ready-to-use channels list.
Proposed Adaptive MCFHSS System Description The proposed adaptive MCFH-SS system utilizes a total bandwidth of WHz, and it is divided into L number of segments as shown in Figure 4. These small segments are called the subbands, and each subband has Lh frequency bins. In each signaling interval, there are Lh subcarriers chosen from the L frequency subbands. This is achieved by either using the inverse discrete Fourier transform (IDFT), or can easily be implemented using IFFT operation. Consider an independent identity distributed (i.i.d) transmitted bits sequence of length M. B={b(q)}
(1.12)
The sequence bit values are set to {0,1} with equal probabilities and q=0,…M-1. The system is assumed to employ DPSK modulation scheme. An information bit sequence b is first encoded by LDPC encoder to a code bit sequence c of length N. The encoded sequence then goes through a random channel interleaver. The performance of the LDPC decoder effected by burst errors due to correlated fading channel. The interleaver is therefore expended to eliminate the effect of fading correlation on consecutive bits. The base-
166
band equivalent of the transmitted signal can be written as; ∞
x (q ) = ∑ q =0
L
∑ l =1
2Es bqe
j 2 π( fl ,q +rq fd )m
ϕT m h
(1.13) where x(q) represents the transmitted power for each diversity transmission and E5is the energy of the signal. The parameter bq is the independent identity distributed (i.i.d) transmitted sequence bits. The sequence bit values are set to {0,1} since the system employs DPSK modulation scheme. The parameter fl,q is the hop frequency for each lth diversity transmission of qth symbol. The reciprocal of the bit duration (fd) separates the subchannels. The parameter rq is the i.i.d random variable uniformly distributed over the interval [1,L]. The parameter m is defined as m=t-qTh where Th is the hop duration of qth symbol and the variable ϕT represents the rectangular pulse of durah
tion Th. For DPSK modulation scheme, the phase difference of two consecutive signals is given by; υ(q ) = υ(q − 1) + ∆υ(q )
(1.14)
where, the phase difference ∆υ(q ) ∈ {0, τ } , corresponds to {0,1} of the coded sequence. At the receiver, the received signals undergo the reverse operations of those at the transmitter. First, the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) is used for reconstruction. The transmitted sequence passes through a slow flat fading channel with AWGN so that the received signal sequence is given as follows; Y={y(q)] where the value of q=0,…N-1.
(1.15)
Adaptive Multicarrier Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum Combined with Channel Coding
The received modulation state y(q)is given by; y(q)=h(q)x(q)+N(q)
(1.16)
where, h(q)is the channel transfer factor with phase φ(q ) and N(q) is the AWGN term with power spectral density of 2σ 2 . The log likelihood ratios (LLR) are calculated based on demodulated received signal, which is then passed to the LDPC decoder after the values are deinterleaved. It is assumed that the h(q) is constant over one symbol interval and has average power equal to the following; Ε{h(q )h(q )*}
(1.17)
If the channel actually varies over the symbol interval TS, this assumption leads to the suboptimal sufficient statistics. For the moment, it is assumed that the channel coefficients h(q)are known to the receiver. The probability density function (PDF) of y(q) over Rayleigh Fading channel is given as; p(y(q ) x (q ), h(q )) =
=
1 e 2πσ 2
p(y(q ), x (q ), h(q )) (1.18) p(x (q ), h(q ))
2 y (q )−x (q )h (q ) − 2 2 σ
1 e 2πσ 2
p(y(q ), y(q − 1) x (q ), x (q − 1), γ(q ),.γ(q − 1), φ(q ), φ(q − 1)) =
This can be written as (1.20)
p(y(q ), y(q − 1) γ(q ), ∆υ(q )) = p(y(q ), y(q − 1) γ(q − 1), υ(q − 1) = 0, .γ(q ), ∆υ(q ))p(γ(q − 1), υ(q − 1) = 0) +p(y(q ), y(q − 1) γ(q − 1), υ(q − 1) = τ,.γ(q ), ∆υ(q ))p(γ(q − 1), υ(q − 1) = τ )
(1.21) From Equation (1.21) the Log Likelihood ratio Λ(q ) is the given by;
Since,
(1.22)
p(y(q ), y(q − 1) γ(q ), ∆υ(q ))
2
1 e = 2πσ 2
(1.19)
When two consecutive independent symbols x(q)and x(q-1)with amplitude γ(q ) and phase difference ∆υ(q ) are transmitted over Rayleigh Fading channel, the conditional joint PDF of the two received consecutive symbols is given as;
2 y (q )−γ (q )x (q )e j φ (q ) − 2 2σ
2 y (q )−γ (q )x (q )∆υ (q ) − 2 2σ
(1.23)
Equation (1.22) can be simplified to Λ(q ) =
=
1 2σ 2
4y(q ){γ(q )∆υ(q )} + 4y(q − 1){γ(q − 1)∆υ(q − 1)} (1.24)
2 j ∆υ(q ) + y(q − 1)γ(q − 1) ES y(q )γ(q ) ES e σ2 (1.25)
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Adaptive Multicarrier Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum Combined with Channel Coding
Figure 5. Data packet
Λ(q ) =
2 ES σ2
Re y(q )γ(q ) + y(q − 1)γ(q − 1) (1.26)
Thus, the optimum decision rule that minimizes the bit error probability is given as; x = + ES if Λ(q ) > 0 (1.27) or x = − ES if Λ(q ) < 0 (1.28) Since the probability decreases with increasing Λ(q ) , the optimum selection rule to minimize the bit error probability is to select those pair of groups that provide largest Λ(q ) .
Implementation of MCFHSS Protocols The frequency hopping code hops among the 64 channels (channel 2 to channel 65) which are pseudo-randomly distributed in a 256-bytes constant table embedded in the code. In addition to the address and Cyclic Redundant Check (CRC), each packet consists of 0-25 bytes of data and one byte of control information as shown in Figure 5. In the first frame, default packets are transmitted. The transmitter and receiver test the channels in the hopping table, and find the suitable one or more channels among them for possible communication. Prior to the agreement between the receiver and transmitter upon which channel to be used, the transmitter must first be informed about the condition of test packets at receiver. Therefore, the receiver will include that informa-
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tion in the ACK message that is sent after the frame has been received. The problem is that the receiver will not know whether the transmitted ACK message at the transmitter is in readable form or not. If the transmitter transmits an ACK message back to the receiver in order to verify that the acknowledgment was OK, the same problem happens, and resultantly a ceaseless series of ACK packets. In this work however, the transmission of multiple ACK messages can be avoided, since it reduces both the available transmission time and the number of channels that can be tested. A flowchart for a transmitter and receiver of the MCFH-SS system is shown in Figure 6. Referring to the flowchart of transmission packets, as shown in Figure 6 (a), each time the transmitter (of the transceiver) transmits a test packet through a channel; it waits for an acknowledgment (ACK) on that particular same channel. If the ACK message is received within a pre-defined time-out (3ms in this system), this channel is placed in the list of ready-to-use channels. The ready-to-use channels are blocked with PN codes in order to keep them away from intentional or unintentional jammers and only accessible to the proposed system. The transmitter and receiver update the ready-to-use and ban channels list after each pre-defined timeout. Before sending a data packet, the ready-to-use channels on the channel lists of transmitter and receiver are read out sequentially and then they are used for transmission. If the channels in the list are corrupted or busy, then the procedure of transmitting test packets as shown in Figure 6 (a) is repeated. There is no uncertainty about which
Adaptive Multicarrier Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum Combined with Channel Coding
Figure 6. Flowchart of packets (a) Transmitter of the proposed MCFH-SS system (b) Reciever of the proposed MCFH-SS system
channel to be used for the next frame, and which channels to be tested next. After each received frame, the receiver transmits the ACK message to the transmitter as shown in Figure 6 (b). A copy of the receiver’s channels list, the number of packets in the receive buffer and receiver’s estimate values of p are enclosed in that ACK message.
OVERALL SYSTEM SETUP AND IMPLEMENTATION USING VECTOR SIGNAL ANALYZER Vector Signal Analyzer (VSA) provides flexibility in making so many kinds of measurements especially valuable for top-level (transmitter/ receiver characterization) system work. VSA software provides a complete vision to a user in
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Adaptive Multicarrier Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum Combined with Channel Coding
Figure 7. Overall system scheme
a perfect communication system to investigate different aspects of the same signal at the same time. Familiar tools such as spectrum analyzers with demodulation scheme indicate the existence of problem, but not able to detect the cause of it. The VSA provides the tools to identify the root cause of the problem and to examine frequent prospects such as changing phase, magnitude and frequency. There are several sources to get data such as multiple supported hardware platforms, recorded files or, from the Matlab software by means of general purpose interface bus (GPIB) and a signal generator. The VSA performance also depends on PC processing speed in order to know the functionality of a complete system. The VSA software provides an Application Programming Interface to its Component Object Model or (COM API). Herein the COM API will be used to program and control the VSA software and signal generator from Matlab. The overall system setup is shown in Figure 7. The workstation installed with Matlab program
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and VSA software is connected to signal generator by means of a GPIB bus. It is then connected to a hardware platform and spectrum analyzer. The hardware platform output is connected to the spectrum analyzer RF in and serially connects to the workstation. The whole system is fully controlled by a workstation. Matlab is used to discover, identify, modify and control all the equipments and VSA software by means of Application Programming Interface to its Component Object Model (COM API). Once the signal is produced on Matlab, it is sent to the signal generator by means of GPIB commands. In order to send the signal, the load SCPI command is used, but it must be adapted to the dynamic range of the signal generator. First of all, identification for GPIB devices must be done in order to create an object in Matlab for possible communication with them. Later, the signal generator and spectrum analyzer alignment must be done. At the first one, aspects as the carrier power and frequency of the signal are firstly
Adaptive Multicarrier Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum Combined with Channel Coding
adjusted. Then, the signal can be sent from Matlab by the esg_darb GPIB command. The ARB (arbitrary waveform) is then activated. It allows selecting the signal sent by the user. Finally, the RF output is changed to ON with the objective of allowing the Signal Generator to launch noise signal to the hardware platform. An important issue arises with the Automatic Level Control (ALC). When the ALC is set to ON, the internal level detector checks the output level and does not fluctuate much from the assigned amplitude value. The output level of ALC is directly proportional to the amplifier output gain. However, in some cases when the ALC is incapable to maintain the output level, the unlevel message appears to report the unleveled condition to the user. Thus, in order to allow the user to alter the amplitude from Matlab, the ALC should be OFF to see the correct amplitude value. The center frequency and span must be adjusted in order to observe the signal on spectrum analyzer. Otherwise, the signal will be seen on the PC with the help of VSA software.
SUMMARY This chapter presents an adaptive MCFH-SS system employing proposed QC-LDPC codes instead of the conventional LDPC codes. A new technique for constructing the QC-LDPC codes based on row division method is proposed. The new codes offer more flexibility in terms of girth, code rates and codeword length. In this method of code construction, the rows are used to form as the distance graph. They are then transformed to a parity-check matrix in order to acquire the desired girth. Moreover, a new scheme for channel prediction in MCFH-SS system is also proposed. The technique adaptively estimates the channel conditions and eliminates the need for the system to transmit a request message prior to transmitting the packet data. The proposed adaptive MCFH-SS system uses PN sequences to spread out frequency
spectrum, reduce the power spectral density and minimize the jammer effects. In the last section of this Chapter, the hardware implementation of the proposed system is described. The hardware platform consists of communication development kit that is interfaced with Xilinx Spartan-3E development board. The user can easily program the device with custom protocols for use in their end product or for general product development. The workstation installed with Matlab program and VSA software is connected to a signal generator by means of a GPIB bus. Then, it is connected also to the hardware platform and spectrum analyzer.
Future Work Some concrete ideas for future works are as the following; 1. The larger the system bandwidth, the shorter the pulses must be. Therefore, for direct spread spectrum system, WSS is restricted to few hundred MHz, by reason of hardware limitations. This means that the processing gain of the system is also inadequate. Additionally, the system bandwidth must be contiguous. The employment of FHSS system overcomes these restrictions. Implement the proposed system, presented in this thesis for underwater communications in shallow water. Thus, this reveals many in the challenges to determine the performance of the system, such as the propagation delays, very limited available bandwidth, the effect of Doppler spread and Doppler shift. 2. Design and implement the irregular QCLDPC codes in cooperative communication with more complex semi-parallel architecture, with reduced number of iterations and high decoding throughput. The mainly issues in cooperative communication are the cost of signaling overhead required for device cooperation, the design of cooperation
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schemes with limited complexity, and exhibiting robustness to a lack of exact channel state information and the better evaluation of system-level gains.
REFERENCES Baer, H. P. (1992). Interference Effects of Hard Limiting in PN Spread-Spectrum Systems. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 5, 1010–1017.
Katsoulis, G., & Robertson, R. C. (1997). Performance Bounds for Multiple Tone Interference of Frequency-hopped Noncoherent MFSK Systems. Proceedings IEEE Military Communications Conference, p.307-312. Mackay, D. J. (1999). Good error-correcting codes based on very sparse matrices. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 45(2), 399–431. doi:10.1109/18.748992
Berlekamp, E. R. (1980). The technology of error correcting codes. Proceedings of the IEEE, 68, 564–593. doi:10.1109/PROC.1980.11696
Pérez, J. J., Rodriguez, M. A., & Felici, S. (2002). Interference Excision Algorithm for Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum Based on Undecimated Wavelet Packet Transform. Electronics Letters, 38(16), 914–915. doi:10.1049/el:20020583
Campello, J., Modha, D. S., & Rajagopalan, S. (2001).Designing LDPC codes using bit-filling. Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC ’01), Vol. 1, p. 55-59, Helsinki, Finland.
Robertson, R. C., & Sheltry, J. F. (1996). Multiple Tone Interference of Frequency Hopped Noncoherent MFSK Signals Transmitted Over Ricean Fading Channels. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 44(7), 867–875. doi:10.1109/26.508306
Cheun, K., & Stark, W. E. (1995). Performance of FHSS Systems Employing Carrier Jitter against One-Dimensional Tone Jamming. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 43(10), 2622–2629. doi:10.1109/26.469437
Simon, M. Omura, J. Scholtz, R., & Levitt. B. (1994). Spread Spectrum Communications handbook. McGraw–Hill Inc., revised edition.
Deo, N. (1974). Graph Theory with Applications to Engineering and Computer Science. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Gallager, R. G. (1963). Low-Density Parity-Check Code. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hu, X. Y. Eleftheriou, E. & Arnold, D. M. (2001). “Progressive edge-growth Tanner graphs,” IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, p. 995–1001.
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Spasojevic, Z., & Burns, J. (2000). Performance Comparison of Frequency Hopping and Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum Systems in the 2.4GHz Range (pp. 426–430). Aegis Systems Ltd. Tanner, R. M. (1981). A recursive approach to low complexity codes. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IT-27, 533–547. doi:10.1109/ TIT.1981.1056404 Wang, Y., Yedidia, J. S., & Draper, S. C. (2008). Construction of high-girth QC-LDPC codes. 5th International Symposium on Turbo Codes and Related Topics, p.180-185.
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APPENDIX 1. Code Size The code size defines the dimensions of the parity check matrix(M × N ) . Occasionally the term code length is used referring to n. usually a code is defined employing its length and row column weight in the form(N , j, k ) . M can be deduced from the code parameters N , j and k . It has been determined that long codes execute better than shorter codes but need more hardware implementation resources. 2. Code Weights and Rate The rate of a code R , is the number of information bits over the total number of bits transmitted. Higher row and column weights result in extra computation at each node because of many incoming messages. Nevertheless, if many nodes contribute in estimating the probability of a bit the node accomplishes a consensus faster. Higher rate indicate fewer redundancy bits. Namely, more information data is transmitted per block resulting in high throughput. Though, low redundancy implies less protection of bits and thus less decoding performance or higher error rate. Low rate codes have more redundancy with less throughput. More redundancy results in more decoding performance. But, low rate may have poor performance with a small number of connections. LDPC codes with column-weight of two have their minimum distance increasing logarithmically with code size as compared to a linear increase for codes with column-weight of three or higher. Column weights higher than two are generally employed but carefully designed irregular codes could have better performance. 3. Code structure The structure of a code is ascertained by the pattern of connection between rows and columns. The connection pattern ascertains the complexity of the communication interconnect between check and variable processing nodes in an encoder and decoder hardware implementations. Random codes do not chase any predefined or known pattern in row-column connections. Structured codes on the hand have a known interconnection pattern. 4. Number of iterations The number of iterations is the number of times the received bits are estimated before a hard decision is made by the decoding algorithm. A large number of iterations may make sure decoding algorithm convergence but will increase decoder delay and power consumption. The number of corrected errors normally decreases with an increasing number of iteration. Binary-input memoryless symmetric channel, the term; Binary-input indicates that the data transmitted is a discrete symbol from Galois Field F2 i.e., {0; 1},
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Memoryless implies that each symbol is affected independently by the noise in the channel and, Symmetric indicates the noise in the channel affects the 0s and 1s in the same way. As, there is no direct connection between any two variable nodes in the factor graph, the decoding of the code symbol can be mulled over on each variable node independently. It shows that the local decoding operations can be executed independently at both variable and check nodes side in the factor graph. If the factor graph is cycle free, then the independency supposition is valid while if the factor graph has cycles, then the assumption will be valid for few iterations until the messages have moved around the entire cycles. 5. Cycle A cycle in a distance graph is formed by a path edges or vertices starting from a vertex νx and ending at νx . No more than two vertices forming the cycle belong to the same column. 6. Girth The girth g, is the smallest cycle in the graph. A cycle of length of g in the graph corresponds to a cycle of length 2g in the matrix form. 7. Minimum distance The Hamming weight of a codeword is the number of 1’s of the codeword. The Hamming distance between any two code words is the number of bits with which the words differ from each other, and the minimum distance of a code is the smallest Hamming distance between two code words. The larger the distance the better the performance of a code. Very long and large girth LDPC codes tend to have larger minimum distances. A better code could be ascertained by employing minimum distance as a measure.
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Chapter 11
Key Adoption Challenges and Issues of B2B E-Commerce in the Healthcare Sector Chad Lin Curtin University, Australia Hao-Chiang KoongLin National University of Tainan, Taiwan Geoffrey Jalleh Curtin University, Australia Yu-An Huang National Chi Nan University, Taiwan
ABSTRACT Although B2B e-commerce provides healthcare organizations a wealth of new opportunities and ways of doing business, it also presents them with a series of challenges. B2B e-commerce adoption remain poorly understood and it is also a relatively under-researched area. Therefore, case studies were conducted to investigate the challenges and issues in adopting and utilizing B2B e-commerce systems in the healthcare sector. The major aims of this study are to: (a) identify and examine main B2B e-commerce adoption challenges and issues for healthcare organizations; and (b) develop a B2B e-commerce adoption challenges and issues table to assist healthcare organizations in identifying and managing them.
INTRODUCTION Business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce has achieved considerable importance for the global economy in recent years. B2B e-commerce is an initiative which requires the participation of multiple firms making some sort of complementary DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch011
investment to enable one another’s EC strategy (Burn and Ash, 2005; Lin et al., 2007). Currently, the most popular electronic commerce applications used by organizations in their B2B relationships are EDI, web-forms, XML, and other varieties of Internet initiatives such as electronic marketplace and B2B web portals (Chan and Swatman, 2003; Standing and Lin, 2007). Depending on the
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Key Adoption Challenges and Issues of B2B E-Commerce in the Healthcare Sector
characteristics of the products, market variability, market volatility, and continuity of the business relationship between the channel partners the B2B e-commerce markets can take different forms, such as electronic hierarchies, cooperative arrangements, and spot markets. Although healthcare is the biggest service industry worldwide, it has historically lagged behind other industries in the use of information technology (IT) such as B2B e-commerce (Lee and Shim, 2007; Parente, 2000; Wickramasinghe et al., 2005). Despite high expectations for realizing benefits from B2B e-commerce in the healthcare, its use remains poorly understood (Bhakoo and Sohal, 2008; Davidson and Heslinga, 2007) and is also a relatively under-researched area (Chiasson et al., 2007). Little is known about why certain organizations within the healthcare industry have adopted and implemented IT such as B2B e-commerce successfully while many others have not (Heeks, 2006; Miller, 2003). Until recently, Australian healthcare supply chain has been still a mainly paper based system with manual processing (GS1, 2004). Effective utilization of B2B e-commerce in the healthcare industry has the potential to lead to an increased accessibility to healthcare providers, improved work-flow efficiency, a higher quality of healthcare services, improved inventory management, and reduction in healthcare costs and medical errors (Bhakoo and Sohal, 2008; Heeks, 2006; Lin et al., 2008a, 2008b).
BENEFITS OF B2B E-COMMERCE IN HEALTHCARE The adoption of B2B e-commerce by healthcare organizations includes online activities such as biotechnology online transactions between, for example, hospitals and their suppliers and the sales of medical products and services via emarketplace (Parente, 2000; Standing et al., 2008). It enables healthcare organizations to minimize
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their procurement costs and assists their suppliers to sell via an efficient marketing channel (Parente, 2000). B2B e-commerce allows health organizations’ business partners to access their internal business systems via the Internet. Some of the major benefits of B2B e-commerce specifically to healthcare organizations are: (1) it gives medical suppliers access to huge number of new customers and suppliers (Suomi et al., 2001); (2) it can reduce healthcare organizations’ costs such as procurement costs, inventory holding, and search costs (Bhakoo and Sohal, 2008); (3) it allows healthcare organizations to compare the partners effectively and easily the change traditionally rigid procurement contracts (Suomi et al., 2001); (4) it provides an efficient and effective channel for medical information exchange and sharing among healthcare organizations (Suomi et al., 2001); (5) it helps to provide accurate and timely business information and streamline orders and payments (CR Group, 2002); and (6) it offers an effective channel and platform for suppliers and customers to trade and communicate (Suomi et al., 2001).
GOVERNMENT/INDUSTRY B2B E-COMMERCE INITIATIVES IN HEALTHCARE There are several subtle as well as obvious differences between healthcare industry and other industries. For instance, the healthcare industry, unlike other industries, does not generally face stiff competition. In addition, organizations in other industries expect to maximize their profits whereas many stakeholders (e.g hospital patients and governments) in the healthcare organizations expect better and efficient products and services (Suomi et al., 2001). Therefore, healthcare organizations must look at B2B e-commerce from a strategic perspective and measure its contribution because it can assist them in developing and controlling strategic, tactical, and operational plans that define the appropriate role of B2B e-
Key Adoption Challenges and Issues of B2B E-Commerce in the Healthcare Sector
commerce in the organization (McGaughey, 2002). However, the difficulty of dealing with challenges and benefits are some of the major problems in B2B e-commerce adoption (Teo and Ranganathan, 2004) among healthcare organizations. In the past, a large number of healthcare organizations have been conducting business via EDI systems and these systems often link customers to only one healthcare supplier. In addition, these proprietary and restrictive EDI systems are expensive to develop and maintain. Driven by concerns about escalating procurement costs in the industry, several B2B e-commerce initiatives have been launched by Australian Federal and State governments during the last decade to develop better ways of, among other things, ordering and procuring medical supplies electronically within the Australian healthcare industry – the HUGLIT group, the Monash Project (GS1, 2005), National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA, 2004), National Supply Chain Reform Task Force (NSCRTF, 2008), Project Electronic Commerce and Communication (PECC) and the Pharmaceutical Extranet Gateway (PEG) (More and McGrath, 2002), and Queensland Health pilot e-Procurement project (Morgan, 2004). The main objectives of these initiatives were to reduce costs of supply chain, save time, increase market share, and improve business relationships for the healthcare organizations (GS1, 2005; More and McGrath, 2002; NEHTA, 2004; NSCRTF, 2008). These initiatives attempted to assist in supply chain management as well as to set standards (e.g. numbering structures and information exchange protocols) for B2B e-commerce in the healthcare industry in Australia. According to Bushell (2000), some of the benefits for having in place standards for the supply chain management process within the healthcare industry include: •
establishing a single identifiers for all transaction types that need to be shared and communicated across borders;
•
•
•
having mandatory IT operability for sharing information inside and outside a healthcare organization; integrating supply chain functionality seamlessly into the other aspects of healthcare delivery; and creating an effective billing and claims systems that is also able to meet the wider requirements of both the clinical environment as well as the administrative one.
MAJOR PROBLEMS OF B2B E-COMMERCE IN HEALTHCARE Despite the best intention and the substantial amount of resources being spent by the government and to a lesser extent, the healthcare industry, these projects/initiatives had only achieved partial success. Organizations in the healthcare industry are still under increasing pressure to adapt and leverage B2B e-commerce to manage their medical supply chains. This is due to the fact that potential for realizing significant benefits for implementation of B2B e-commerce does not always appear to have been enough to provide impetus for extensive adoption by healthcare organizations (Bhakoo and Sohal, 2008). Although B2B e-commerce provides healthcare organizations a wealth of new opportunities and ways of doing business, it also presents them with a series of challenges (Laudon and Laudon, 2004; Lin et al., 2007; Lynch and Beck, 2001) such as: •
•
•
Many new B2B e-commerce business models are difficult to evaluate and therefore, have yet to prove enduring sources of profit; Web-enabling business processes for B2B e-commerce requires far-reaching organizational change; The legal environment for B2B e-commerce has not yet solidified and organiza-
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Key Adoption Challenges and Issues of B2B E-Commerce in the Healthcare Sector
•
tions must be vigilant about establishing trust, security and consumer privacy; and Many healthcare organizations often take the short-term view of examining their electronic commerce success by only looking at the potential advantages of IT use while at the same time are unaware of the factors that may hinder the benefits attainment in the long term such as managing the relationship between the justification of the B2B e-commerce initiatives to stakeholders.
Moreover, it appears that our current understanding of B2B e-commerce adoption and management processes in healthcare has little impact on organizational practice, making factors such as power and politics and resource constraints extremely difficult to identify and measure (Howcroft and McDonald, 2004; Lin et al., 2007). Failure to identify and manage challenges and issues can have detrimental consequences on healthcare organizational performance. Some of the major problems associated with B2B e-commerce in healthcare are: (a) it is difficult to integrate different databases among different suppliers and buyers in order to create new data resources and to increase productivity and effectiveness (CR Group, 2002; Parente, 2000); (2) healthcare is different from other industries due to the high level of government regulations and investments. Compared with other industries, the healthcare industry as a whole generally possesses a relatively underdeveloped IT infrastructure and expertise such as B2B e-commerce (Herzlinger, 2006; Porter and Teisberg, 2004); (3) healthcare organizations are less accustomed to work with new technologies and there is a need to obtain not only technologies but also other relevant expertise and skills to handle them (Parente, 2000); and (4) organizations within the healthcare industry need to cooperate with each other to comply with the requirement of both internal (e.g. pharmacists, healthcare staff, employees) and external stake-
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holders (governments, suppliers, insurers). Thus, business relationships among healthcare organizations are often subject to a variety of factors.
RESEARCH METHODS Case studies were conducted with participants (i.e. IT managers, IT procurement managers, and/or CIOs) from several Australian healthcare organizations. The questions asked related to their B2B e-commerce investments, B2B e-commerce adoption challenges and barriers, and key factors and issues in B2B e-commerce adoption and implementation. Other data collected included contract documents, planning documents and minutes of relevant meetings. Transcripts were coded and analyzed. Semi-structured interviews were used to gain a deeper understanding of issues. Qualitative content analysis by Miles and Huberman (1994) was used to analyze the data from the case study. The analysis of the case study results was conducted in a cyclical manner and the results were checked by other experts in the field. Finally, the guidelines set out by Klein and Myers (1999) for conducting and evaluating interpretive case studies were also followed in an attempt to improve the quality of this research.
RESEARCH FINDINGS Several challenges and issues arose from the analysis of case study data and they are presented below. These are presented in Table 1.
Intra-organizational and Resources Top Management Support Obtaining top management commitment throughout the adoption stage was found to be critical to the success of the IT investments in e-commerce (Power, 2004). Most organizations interviewed
Key Adoption Challenges and Issues of B2B E-Commerce in the Healthcare Sector
Table 1. Types of key challenges and issues for healthcare organizations adopting and implementing B2B e-commerce Types of Challenges
Key Issues
Intra-organizational and Resources
• Top management support • Alignment of organizational goals with business objectives • User involvement & participation • Financial & managerial resources
Industry Inter-organizational and Supply Chain
• Government regulations & standardized B2B protocols • Role of Medicare Australia • Supply chain management • Interoperability
indicated that their senior executives had provided sufficient management leadership as well as obtained necessary organizational commitment towards the adoption of B2B e-commerce within their organizations. Most senior managers were very enthusiastic about their IT investments in B2B e-commerce during the initial adoption stage. However, most organizations also indicated that while senior managers had signed off on the B2B e-commerce projects, there was then little in the way of follow-up support. They perceived it simply as an IT-enabled cost-cutting mechanism rather than as a central strategic issue for their business.
Alignment of Organizational Goals with Business Objectives Alignment with stated organizational goals has a key bearing on how investment is organized and conducted, and the priorities that are assigned to different IT investment proposals (Mirani and Lederer, 1993). There appeared to be a lack of obvious linkage between stated organizational goals the expected outcomes of business objectives for B2B e-commerce. Business objectives for adopting and implementing B2B e-commerce systems by organizations varied greatly. The objectives mentioned by most healthcare organizations were related to the improved supply chain process, cost reduction, decreased administrative errors, and improved work efficiency. Other e-
commerce studies conducted in other countries (e.g. Enterprise Ireland, 2004 in Ireland; Levy et al., 2001 in UK; Locke and Cave, 2002 in New Zealand) suggested that many organizations simply failed to establish a linkage between the reasons for adopting an e-commerce system and their organizational goals. These systems were often installed without linking the benefits to their organizational goals. Other healthcare organizations did not see B2B e-commerce as a tool that would enable to increase their profits and revenue in the short term. Rather, it was adopted and implemented because some of their competitors were already using it, instead of using it to gain competitive advantages or achieve organizational and business objectives. Moreover, for many healthcare organizations interviewed, B2B e-commerce systems were still being regarded as IT focused rather than as a part of the business objectives and/or strategies. Furthermore, most healthcare organizations interviewed had set business goals such as achieving certain percentages of market share or reducing operating costs by certain percentages. But yet they generally did not focus on what strategic directions they were going and how B2B e-commerce can be strategically utilized to assist them to achieve their business goals. They need to be treated as a cost saving mechanism, as an effective way to compete in the healthcare
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Key Adoption Challenges and Issues of B2B E-Commerce in the Healthcare Sector
industry, and as a strategic tool to improve their supply chain.
User Involvement /Participation The relevant literature has stressed that there is a direct relationship between user involvement and success of any IT systems (e.g. Davidson, 2002; Lin and Shao, 2000). However, the adoption and use of the B2B e-commerce systems by the healthcare organizations interviewed generally were forced upon the employees by the senior management. Data collected from the case study indicated that employees, particularly users of B2B e-commerce systems, were not consulted extensively beforehand and were not involved in the designing and adoption of these systems. Those organizations which kept their employees in the dark tended to have lower usage for their systems. Moreover, many benefits expected from the adoption of these systems were tailored mainly for the senior managers, not the lower ranked employees. Lack of user involvement often results in distrust between the affected employees, the senior management, and external B2B e-commerce systems vendors/suppliers. Employees felt that their requirements were not solicited before the adoption of B2B e-commerce projects. Healthcare organizations need to alignment of incentives with their organizational strategies. Establishment of appropriate incentives for their employees and stakeholders is critical in successful adoption of B2B e-commerce projects.
Financial and Managerial Resources Responses from the case study participants revealed that there was a general lack of financial and managerial resources in adopting and implementing B2B e-commerce. All of the organizations interviewed had Internet access and agreed that the further adoption of B2B e-commerce systems would be an important factor for the future success
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of their organizations. The participating organizations indicated that they had used emails to communicate with their customers and suppliers and to increase internal efficiencies. However, more than half of these organizations failed to utilize their B2B e-commerce to conduct business effectively with their customers and suppliers. Many organizations indicated that they did not have sufficient financial and managerial resources to adopt and maintain their B2B e-commerce systems in order to conduct their business transactions online effectively.
Industry Government Regulations and Standardized B2B E-Commerce Protocol The healthcare industry often is subject to government regulations with regard to the adoption of the innovative B2B e-commerce technologies. As revealed by the case study interviewees, the healthcare industry had been subject to the pressures exerted by the government. The pharmaceutical companies, in particular, had to comply with both national and international regulations (e.g. bar coding, Sarbanes-Oxley Act). However, standards alone do not necessarily translate into ongoing improved performance. Many healthcare organizations stated that they need to work towards standardization of a universal product numbering system and for data exchange and information flows in order to facilitate B2B e-commerce. This is vital given that the transactions among healthcare organizations spans many parties and geographical dimensions. This is one important factor influencing the adoption of B2B e-commerce for these organizations in the healthcare industry. Given the substantial efforts and costs of the standardized policies, protocols, and procedures required for the healthcare industry, government role is crucial to facilitate successful B2B e-commerce initiatives. However, a significant
Key Adoption Challenges and Issues of B2B E-Commerce in the Healthcare Sector
number of healthcare organizations interviewed were quite hesitate to participate in government B2B e-commerce initiatives such as PECC. They were also partially influenced by some hardware and software vendors/suppliers fearing that these initiatives might have an impact on their profit margins and thus had no incentives to support these healthcare organizations to participate in these initiatives.
Role of Medicare Australia Medicare Australia is a statutory agency that provides public-funded universal health care system in Australia. It delivers services and payments for, among other things, Medicare, Aged care, and, Private Health Insurance Rebate, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. In recent years, it has encouraged its customers (e.g. hospitals, health providers, and patients) to engage in electronic transactions via its new Medicare Online, Aged Care Online Claiming, and Medicare Easyclaim. According to its 2007-2008 annual report (Medicare Australia, 2009), electronic claiming of bulk bill transactions, for example, has increased from 33% to more than 67% in June 2008. In addition, 69% of all residential aged care service providers had registered for online claiming in June, 2008 (Medicare Australia, 2009). At the moment, it is developing the Unique Healthcare Identifier service to the National E-Health Transition Authority which will be used to uniquely identify individuals as well as healthcare providers (Medicare Australia, 2009). This will have an impact on how healthcare organizations adopt and implement their B2B e-commerce systems.
Inter-Organizational: Supply Chain Effective Supply Chain Management Reliability and consistency of data integrity also affects the effectiveness of B2B e-commerce supply chain management and all other related business
functions which underpin business processes and transactions (Morgan, 2004). Inaccuracies and delays are likely to occur throughout the B2B ecommerce supply chain if there is a problem with data integrity (Morgan, 2004). Hence, effective B2B e-commerce supply chain management in the healthcare industry is critical as it affects the transactions between different stakeholders such as medical manufacturers, pharmacies, wholesalers, retailers, and hospitals. According to several participating health organizations, new technologies such as RFID enhanced supply chain integrity but they were still too costly to implement throughout the entire supply chain for most organizations. Several healthcare organizations interviewed had raised the concerns about whether the B2B e-commerce investments would bring about an equitable benefits for all stakeholders. Those organizations that had fewer problems in adopting and implementing B2B e-commerce systems were those who had better communication with key stakeholders throughout the entire supply chain and had listened to their cost concerns. The other issue mentioned by some participating healthcare organizations related to disaster recovery. They emphasized the importance of having a backup/ alternative B2B e-commerce system and IT disaster recovery and contingency plans in case of system failure. Several interview participants had also mentioned that having an effective supply chain management in their organizations were not good enough. Benefits would only come about if these management processes can be extended into other organizations.
Interoperability Problems Interoperability problems reduce organization’s IT systems to exchange information. It is one of the most cited reasons for B2B e-commerce failure (Clay and Strauss, 2002). Most participating healthcare organizations had some difficulties or simply failed to integrate their B2B e-commerce system with other functions throughout the supply
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chain. Most did not have an IT strategy to integrate their B2B e-commerce with other systems. For example, many healthcare organizations such as hospitals and pharmaceutical companies had purchased their own IT/B2B e-commerce systems, it was therefore not surprising to see that their IT/B2B e-commerce systems within the same organizations was unable to communicate, let alone between hospitals or different healthcare organizations across the entire supply chain. Moreover, many healthcare organizations implemented B2B e-commerce just to obtain gains promised by the vendors but did not believe that their B2B e-commerce systems could be seamlessly integrated with other functions within their organizations. Proper integration of B2B ecommerce and other functions of organizations clearly required a lot of managerial, financial, and technical resources as well as organizational capabilities. Only those healthcare organizations with higher level of IT maturity had more sophisticated B2B e-commerce systems and had been using it for a while had seen the integration of various functions as a main benefit. Lack of standardization polices cause problems for interoperability of systems and the consistency of data exchange and transfer protocols are essential for universal data access across the supply chain within the healthcare industry. The Key B2B E-Commerce Adoption Challenges and Issues Table was developed to assist senior managers to better manage their B2B ecommerce adoption as well as to ensure that the benefits expected are actually realized in order to improve their organization’s long term profitability (Table 1). This table has been developed from literature review and case study results. The table is consist of various major challenges that healthcare organizations need to overcome in order to realize B2B e-commerce benefits. The eight main are the important issues which healthcare organizations should pay attention in order to overcome the B2B e-commerce valuation and conversion barriers. Intra-organizational and resources key
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challenges and issues are consist of top management support, alignment of organizational goals with business objectives, user involvement, and financial and management resources. Industry key success factor includes of government regulation and standardized B2B e-commerce protocol. Inter-organizational and supply chain key challenges and issues are comprised of supply chain management and interoperability issue.
CONCLUSION Case studies were conducted in healthcare organizations which had adopted and implemented B2B e-commerce systems. Several major B2B e-commerce adoption challenges and issues were identified for the healthcare organizations. The findings have the potential to assist healthcare organizations in enhancing the understanding of their B2B e-commerce adoption challenges and issues. One key contribution of the research is the development of the Key B2B E-Commerce Challenges and Issues Table for healthcare organizations. The table suggests that the eight main issues should be considered by healthcare organizations in the process of overcoming their valuation and conversion challenges. Paying close attention to these key challenges and issues will enable healthcare organizations to reap benefits from their B2B e-commerce investments. The Key B2B E-Commerce Adoption Challenges and Issues Table proposed for healthcare organizations in this paper should form part of an overall organizational strategy to guide healthcare organizations towards a balanced approach to manage their IT/B2B e-commerce investments adoption processes. It is also imperative for the senior executives of the healthcare organizations to carefully examine the reasons behind having these B2B e-commerce challenges and then focus their attention on the key challenges and issues identified in the table in order to obtain expected B2B e-commerce benefits. Other behavioral,
Key Adoption Challenges and Issues of B2B E-Commerce in the Healthcare Sector
attitudinal and organizational issues should not be neglected. From a practical standpoint, understanding the reactions of their employees toward the newly acquired B2B e-commerce systems and their subsequent behavior can help healthcare organizations to devise appropriate intervention strategies and programs to maximize their use and their effects on the organizations. This is important given that most healthcare firms, from our own observation, still pay little attention toward the effective utilization of any IT including B2B e-commerce. According to Davidson and Heineke (2007), stakes are too high to be content with gradual diffusion of the healthcare IT and therefore, deliberate steps must be identified to achieve desirable outcomes and increase the pace of dissemination. One way of doing it is to identify the relevant opinion leaders who can serve to reduce the uncertainty of others in adopting new IT resources. Finally, despite large investments in B2B ecommerce over many years, it has been difficult for healthcare organizations to determine where benefits have occurred, if indeed there have been any. Little published work has been conducted in adoption of B2B e-commerce in the healthcare industry and hence there is still a lot to be learned in the area. Through the case study results presented in this paper it is hoped that better B2B e-commerce adoption and implementation strategies may be developed by healthcare organizations.
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS The very first electronic commerce was conducted over electronic data interchange (EDI) networks but the technology was expensive and extremely restrictive (Standing and Lin, 2007). Later, some major organizations (e.g. Wal-Mart) created their own Intranets and private networks to link to their purchasers, distributors, and suppliers. Currently, we see the rise two different electronic commerce entities - e-Marketplaces and B2B e-commerce
web portals. E-Marketplaces allow online purchasers and suppliers to find each other and avoid the inefficiencies of traditional markets. B2B ecommerce web portals, as mentioned earlier, are industry focused and often are initiated by the government and the industry itself. They allow industry players (e.g. hospitals and pharmaceutical companies) to access a wider range of purchasers, distributors, and suppliers and to sell their products and services to each other. Unlike many other industries, B2B e-commerce web portals within the healthcare industry generally are not mature enough. Due to the limited IT sophistication between healthcare organizations and their purchasers, distributors, suppliers, and business partners in the past, they are lagging behind the bigger players in other industries in using web based commerce applications to create competitive business networks. However, these applications are transforming industry by shifting business focus from physical stores to the virtual business. It is creating a more level playing field for all industry players. It is expected that future Internet applications will bring about faster and more efficient business to healthcare organizations by providing customers convenience and variety. To take advantages of these new highly efficient and cost effective channels, getting all healthcare organizations online is critical to forming the critical mass that will make the B2B e-commerce web portals successful. Forming the critical mass will also help make this new channel an industry standard. As discussed in the chapter, many challenges remain for the healthcare organizations to overcome. In particular, healthcare organizations need to pay attention to the supply chain challenges such as lack of standardized B2B protocols and interoperability issue. Industry/governmentsponsored B2B protocols and standards do exist but they need to be improved in order for the healthcare organizations to better interact within and between multiple B2B e-commerce web portals. In addition, healthcare organizations need not only to resolve the interoperability problems
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between their e-commerce systems and the B2B e-commerce web portals but also their ability to participate in multiple B2B e-commerce web portals. This issue will grow in importance in the near future as more and more B2B e-commerce web portals reach critical mass in not just the healthcare industry but also in other industries. Healthcare organizations are likely to have to work out how to access different B2B e-commerce web portals without incurring the costs of installing new systems as well as membership fees.
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Lin, C., Pervan, G., Lin, H.-C., & Tsao, H. (2008b). An Investigation into Business-to-Business Electronic Commerce Organizations. Journal of Research and Practices in Information Technology, 40(1), 3–18. Lin, W. T., & Shao, B. B. M. (2000). The Relationship Between User Participation and System Success: A Simultaneous Contingency Approach. Information & Management, 37, 283–295. doi:10.1016/S0378-7206(99)00055-5 Locke, S., & Cave, J. (2002). Information Communication Technology in New Zealand SMEs. Journal of American Academy of Business, 2(1), 235–240. Lynch, P. D., & Beck, J. C. (2001). Profiles of Internet Buyers in 20 Countries: Evidence for Region-Specific Strategies. Journal of International Business Studies, 32(4), 725–748. doi:10.1057/ palgrave.jibs.8490992 McGaughey, R. E. (2002). Benchmarking Business-to-business Electronic Commerce, Benchmarking. International Journal (Toronto, Ont.), 9(5), 471–484. Medicare Australia. (2009) Medicare Australia Annual Report 2007-2008, Canberra, Australia. Melville, N., Kraemer, K., & Gurbaxani, V. (2004). Review: Information Technology and Organizational Performance: An integrative Model of IT Business Value. Management Information Systems Quarterly, 28(2), 283–322. Miles, M. B., & Huberman, A. M. (1994). Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook. California: Sage Publications. Miller, J. (2003). Measuring and Aligning Information Systems with the Organization. Information & Management, 25(4), 217–228. doi:10.1016/03787206(93)90070-A
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS B2B E-Commerce: Business-to-business electronic commerce. Business conducted through the Internet between companies. Benefits: The tangible and intangible returns or payback expected to be obtained from a systems investment or implementation. E-Commerce: A business model that is conducted over the Internet in which clients are able to participate in all phases of a purchase decision. Electronic commerce can be between two businesses transmitting funds, goods, services or between a business and a customer. Information Technology (IT): Any computerbased tool that users use to work with information and support the information needs of an organization. Healthcare Industry: The health profession industry which offers services in relation to the preservation of health by preventing or treating illness. Supply Chain Management (SCM): It involves coordinating and integrating the network of retailers, wholesalers, distributors, transporters,
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storage facilities, and suppliers that involve in the sale, delivery and production of a particular product or service, both within and among different organizations. It covers all movement and storage of raw materials, work-in-process inventory, and finished goods within and across different organizations.
User Involvement: User participation. It is an act or a process for users to actively participate and/or or share their expertise, thoughts, and experience during a system development life cycle or project.
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Chapter 12
A Pervasive Polling SecretSharing Based Access Control Protocol for Sensitive Information Juan Álvaro Muñoz Naranjo Universidad de Almería, Spain Justo Peralta López Universidad de Almería, Spain Juan Antonio López Ramos Universidad de Almería, Spain
ABSTRACT This chapter presents a novel access control mechanism for sensitive information which requires permission from different entities or persons to be accessed. The mechanism consists of a file structure and a protocol which extend the features of the OpenPGP Message Format standard by using secret sharing techniques. Several authors are allowed to work in the same file, while access is blocked for not authorized users. Access control rules can be set indicating the minimum number of authors that need to be gathered together in order to open the file. Furthermore, these rules can be different for each section of the document, allowing collaborative work. Non-repudiation and authentication are achieved by means of a shared signature. The scheme’s features are best appreciated when using it in a mobile scenario. Deployment in such an environment is easy and straight. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch012 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
A Pervasive Polling Secret-Sharing Based Access Control Protocol for Sensitive Information
INTRODUCTION Protection of sensitive information is an everpresent concern which is gaining more and more attention as digitalization of information and use of Internet increase. Numerous privacy protocols, standards and applications exist in order to keep information away from unauthorized persons, as well as to authenticate its author. Most of them regard privacy while information is being transmitted through the web and provide authentication (OpenSSH) (Dierks&Rescorla, 2008) (Atkinson, 1995) (Kohl, 1989) (Paterson &Yau, 2006). GnuPG (GnuPG) and PGP (PGP) applications also protect information while stored in a device. Both implement the OpenPGP Message Format standard (Callas, Donnerhacke, Finney, Shaw, & Thayer, 2007). Those protocols and applications usually work on an individual basis, that is, a single user manages the privacy of its own information. Some examples are: communicating in a private and/or authenticated way with a Web server, protecting personal information and keeping a private and/ or authenticated email conversation. Some scenarios may require, in addition to protection and authentication of information, some kind of access control measures. That is the case of governmental classified documents (defense, foreign affairs, historical, etc.) or high-value information in private companies. Controlling the access to this kind of documents is critical, and may require the approval of third-party entities or individuals, or even a set of them. Security restrictions will be even higher when modifying the classified information. On a different matter, advances in smart devices and connectivity have given us the chance to access Internet from almost anywhere and at any time. Internet access is no longer confined to static devices that cannot be taken with us. Now that the technology already exists, it is time to develop new mechanisms and applications that take advantage of it.
Having all this in mind we have designed a polling-based file access control mechanism that is presented in this chapter. This mechanism includes an extension of the OpenPGP Message Format and a protocol: access to the file is granted only under the approval of a minimum number of authorized users, and modifications are signed for authenticity and integrity verification. The first feature is achieved by using secret sharing techniques; the later by using a shared signature. Section Background explains and discusses some technologies that keep some similarity, along with the OpenPGP Message Format, the secret sharing techniques and the shared signature. Section Our Proposal introduces our scheme with some mobility and security considerations, and finally the last section shows the conclusions of the chapter.
BACKGROUND Alike Technologies: Publish/ Subscribe Systems and Version Control Systems There are two technologies that keep some relation to the one proposed here. They are (1) publish/ subscribe systems and (2) version control systems. State-of-the-art publish/subscribe systems consist of an infrastructure that provides communication capabilities for large-scale, wide-area distributed systems. They nicely fit multi-domain, heterogeneous environments. The communication pattern is based on a per-event, asynchronous basis, either one-to-many or many-to-many, depending on the scenario. Such a system is presented in (Pietzuch & Bacon, 2002), along with a wider bibliographic review. A typical case-of-use appears in (Pesonen, Eyers, & Bacon, 2007): a multi-domain network that handles car plate recognition for fee-charging purposes in the London metropolitan area. Additionally, several works and proposals have been presented in order to cover
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the security aspects, such as (Wang, Carzaniga, Evans, & Wolf, 2002) (Fiege, Zeidler, Buchmann, Kilian-Kehr, Mühl, & Darmstadt, 2004)(Pesonen, Eyers, & Bacon, 2006). Version control systems are (usually) distributed applications that facilitate the management of projects and documents, especially when there are several authors involved. Typical features of these systems include: • • •
•
Different users involved. Document versions management and publication (milestones, branches, etc.). Document history tracking: it is possible to follow a document’s history, and to recover a previous state or version. Event logging.
Well known version control systems are CVS (CVS), Subversion (Subversion), Microsoft SourceSafe (SourceSafe), JEDI Version Control System (JEDI), etc. Each technology has its own scenario of application. The goals of our mechanism, though related, differ slightly from those mentioned above. A typical case of use for ours is management of high-value information that is stored in one or several trusted servers. A set of authorized users may access the protected data, and modify them only after the approval of a sufficiently large number of (different) users. The nature of the high-value information might be commercial (the firm’s major stakeholders being the authorized users), personal (laws protect several kinds of citizens’ personal information in many countries) or even military.
The OpenPGP Message Format The OpenPGP Message Format was designed to offer a combination of privacy and authentication when storing (on physical devices) and sending (via Internet) information in files. Compression can be also applied. The GnuPG and PGP appli-
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cations provide more functionality, such as key and certificate management, but the OpenPGP Message Format can be seen as the core of both applications. This section covers the basic structure of the format. A wider description can be found in (Callas, Donnerhacke, Finney, Shaw, & Thayer, 2007) and (Lucas, 2006). First of all, let us have a quick look at how GnuPG works. The application allows a user to encrypt a piece of information (such as a message or a file) and send it to one or more recipients. Only the specified recipients (including the creator himself) will be able to decrypt the information. Additionally, the creator can prove its identity by adding a digital signature, no matter whether the information is encrypted or not. The message can also be compressed is desired. More technically, each GnuPG user owns one or more public/private key pair. As the reader probably knows, an information piece encrypted with a public key can only be decrypted with its private counterpart, and vice versa. This elemental property of Public Key Cryptography is smartly exploited in the OpenPGP Message Format. One of the features GnuPG offers is the use of a contacts agenda: it allows storing and managing the information related to our contacts, such as name, email and, most important, public key. They will be useful when establishing the recipients of a message. In the same way, our contacts will probably have our data too. Now we can focus on the Message Format itself. The basic idea is to encrypt the information with a symmetric key, namely session key, and then attach it to the message in a way it is protected from outsiders. The problem is solved by encrypting the session key with the public key of the recipient. The result is attached to the message. There can be more than one recipient: the session key is encrypted separately with every recipient’s public key, and all the results are packed together. There are, hence, three main sections in a
A Pervasive Polling Secret-Sharing Based Access Control Protocol for Sensitive Information
complete message: the encrypted information, the signature and the encrypted session keys section. Let D be the information to be signed and encrypted. D is signed in first place, and the signature attached. If decided to, D is compressed in this moment. Afterwards, a new session key is generated, and D is encrypted (the session key is created according to the symmetric algorithm to be used). Now, let us assume there are n recipients for the message. The session key is encrypted n times, each one with the public key of the respective recipient. All the encrypted session keys are attached at the beginning of the message. The decryption process for each recipient consists of finding a header that can be decrypted, obtaining the session key, then decrypting the information and verifying the signature with the sender’s public key. Note that the information can also be encrypted for personal use only, to keep information private when stored in a physical device. In that case the recipient is the same as the creator, and only he/ she will be able to decrypt the file, if desired. An inconvenient of the headers approach is the need for encrypting the same piece of info several times, hence having redundant information. The good news is that it is a direct and efficient approach that keeps the file structure simple.
Secret Sharing An intuitive approach to Secret Sharing might be the following: “Secret Sharing techniques allow dividing a secret into several ‘pieces’, in a way that the secret can be recovered by gathering some of them (all of them in some cases).” Actually, this affirmation is just a way of seeing Secret Sharing. Usually, these techniques do not “slice” the secret: they generate pieces of information that depend on it. These pieces, called
shares, can be processed together to obtain the original piece of info. The most popular family of techniques within the Secret Sharing pool is that of threshold schemes. A (t,n) threshold scheme can be described as: “computing n shares that depend on a secret S, so that t≤n shares allow the generation of S, being this impossible with a number of shares below the threshold t”. A perfect (t,n) threshold scheme is one in which knowing only t-1 or fewer shares provides no advantage to an attacker over knowing no pieces (Menezes, van Oorscht, & Vanstone, 1996). The initial motivation for secret sharing was backing up cryptographic keys in such a way that no participant had a full knowledge of them. More recent uses have emerged: shared control for activities that require the collaboration or supervision of many entities or persons (opening bank vaults, military orders) and even logical and physical access control (the protocol presented in this chapter is a logical access control).
Shamir’s Threshold Scheme Probably the most famous threshold scheme is the one from Shamir (Shamir, 1979). It shows some desirable features: 1. It is perfect (as defined previously). 2. The size of each share does not exceed that of the secret. 3. New users are accepted: it is possible to compute new shares without affecting those existing. 4. Its security is demonstrated mathematically and it is not based on the unfeasibility of brute force attacks. Let us see now a mathematical description of this elegant method, taken from (Pastor Franco
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& Sarasa López, 1998). Assume S is the secret and that at least t shares will be needed for its reconstruction. First, a prime p such that 0 ≤ p > S and a polynomial P (x ) with degree t-1 are chose. We can note P (x ) as t −1
P (x ) = S + ∑ Pi x i (mod p) i =1
Where 0 ≤ Pi > p are random integers such
that 0 ≤ Pi > p for i = 1,...,(t − 1) . A share
consists of a couple [x i , P (x i )] for i = 1,..., n . Recalculating S with t couples (shares) is possible thanks to the fact that interpolation of a (t-1)-th degree polynomial requires t points at least. The interpolation is calculated by solving the following system of equations: P (x 1 )= S + P1x 1 + ... + Pt −1x 1t −1 (mod p) P (x t ) = S + P1x t + ... + Pt −1x tt −1 (mod p)
where(S , P1,..., Pt −1 ) are the unknown values. A system of this kind has always a solution, which can be efficiently found thanks to the Fast Fourier Transform (Blahut, 1984)(McEliece & Sarwate, 1981). A system created from less than t points (hence with less equations than unknown values) would be underdetermined and would have an infinite number of solutions. To make things even better, the scheme can be easily modified to establish hierarchies within the set of shares, in a way that some shares have more importance than others. An example would be a special share such that the secret could not be computed without it. Even several hierarchy levels can be set: forcing the presence of a top level share, two second level shares and three regular shares would be an example.
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Shamir’s scheme has been extensive studied and some attacks have been conceived, always under the assumption of a many share-owners alliance with the intention of illegally recovering the secret. There are also other secret sharing schemes (Brickell, Some ideal secret sharing schemes, 1989)(Brickell & Davenport, 1991)(Chen, Gollmann, Mitchell, & Wild, 1997)(Numao, 1999) (Srinathan, Tharani Rajan, & Pandu Rangan, 2002) (Wang & Wong, 2008). Secret sharing is used in our protocol to force a rendezvous of at least a given number of users (each user is provided with a single share).
Shared Signature The utility of digital shared signature techniques is to bind two signers together when signing a document or piece of information, proving that the action was carried together by both. It was first introduced in (Radu, Govaerts, & Vandewalle, 1997), though other schemes exist (Luo, Si, Liu, & Li, 2008). They have been extensively used in electronic cash. Shared signature techniques work by computing a pair of keys (public and private) from signers’ own pairs. A hash of the info is encrypted with the new private key. The verifier can use the new public key to verify the signature. It must be unfeasible to obtain the signers’ private keys from the new pair. Signers’ private keys must remain secret: each signer must have no information about the other’s private key. Our scheme uses a shared signature to leave evidence of the last edition on the document, thus providing non-repudiation. The document is signed with a shared private key derived from the author who made the last changes and an Authorization Center (which will be introduced later). The resultant shared public key can be used later to verify the signature.
A Pervasive Polling Secret-Sharing Based Access Control Protocol for Sensitive Information
OUR PROPOSAL
•
Proposed File Structure The proposed scheme is based in a file structure which is described in this section. This structure is managed by an Authorization Center, which will be introduced in the following subsection. The file contains the encrypted information and other sections at the beginning and the end of it. The symmetric key used to encrypt the information is called session key, to keep similarity with the OpenPGP Message Format Standard. Session keys should be generated using a cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generator, and they should be different for each file (ANSI X9.17 standard) (Zhuo, Zhengwen, & Nan, 2008). Shares are generated for the session key at the moment of file creation. The number of shares should be equal to the number of authors considered. Each author is assigned a share, and a header is built for him/her. The Authorization Center also assigns itself a header in which it stores the whole key. The reason for this is explained in the Security Considerations Section. The following information is included in each header: •
Author’s Id/name.
• •
Encryption parameters: symmetric algorithm used, block size (if applicable), key length (if applicable), encryption mode (ECB, CBC ...), padding mode (PKCS7, ISO 10126 ...) and any other information required for decryption (Menezes, van Oorscht, & Vanstone, 1996). Minimum number of authors required for reconstruction of the session key. The share itself.
The header is then encrypted by using a public key algorithm and the corresponding author’s public key. This ensures privacy of the share. Note that the “encryption parameters” and the “minimum number of authors” values are similar for all headers. All headers are grouped together in a headers section and included at the beginning of the file, before the encrypted information. Figure 1 shows the process. An Encrypted metadata section is placed after the headers. It contains: • • • •
Content type/format of encrypted info. Version of info. Any other information required. Whether the info is compressed or not (and the compression algorithm if necessary).
Figure 1. Generation of headers and headers section
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The metadata section is encrypted with the session key. It is followed by the encrypted info section, which contains the original information encrypted using the encryption parameters detailed in every header and the session key. Finally, a shared signature is placed at the end of the file: this signature consists of a hash of all sections (headers, metadata and encrypted info) encrypted using a shared signature technique, as mentioned above in the Shared Signature Subsection. The signature is replaced after every modification of the file. The complete file structure is depicted in Figure 2.
File Management: Proposed Access Protocol Management and hosting of the file is carried out by an Authorization Center, a third part trusted by all authors. We call this entity The Host. The Host, therefore, must keep the file secure and manage the process of access and/or edition to the file when required. In case an Authorization Center does not exist then an author can take the role, if trusted by all others. The Host determines the authors in the system. Additionally, it keeps and manages a list with useful information from the authors, such as their email address and their public keys.
Figure 2. File structure
Files are created outside The Host. A new file must be uploaded to the Host by an author or by other kind of authorized user, such as a Host administrator. The policy that determines which authors are assigned to the file is not discussed in this chapter, since different scenarios may require different strategies. For the sake of simplicity let us assume that The Host decides which authors might have access to the file (and, therefore, have a header attached to it). After the file is uploaded and the header section is created, a shared signature is created. This signature binds the up loader and The Host. A protocol for read and edition access is presented next. Communications are made under a secure channel (using SSL, TLS or similar). Each file in The Host is assigned a unique identifier (FileID). To assure version consistence the edition access imposes a lock for other actions of the same type. This means that only one edition access at a time is permitted. Nevertheless, many read accesses can be carried out concurrently, even if an edition access is being performed. In that case, the reader is aware of the fact that the file is being edited at that moment, since all edition actions are notified. Each transaction is assigned a unique identifier (TransID). Only one transaction of any kind is allowed per author at a time. Let us assume there are n authors and a minimum of t are required to decrypt the file. Every author and The Host are assigned a header in the file, as mentioned in the Proposed File Structure Subsection. Assume also that author A is the one who performs the read or edit action. For read access: 1. A sends The Host a ReadFileID message. 2. The Host assigns the transaction a new TransID and sends every other author the message ReadFileIDTransIDA, which indicates that author A wants to access the file for reading purposes only. This message
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includes the corresponding header for every contacted author. 3. Every author excepting A replies with a message Allow TransID (giving permission) or Deny TransID (denying permission), depending on the author decision. Messages Allow TransID also include the header content, decrypted with the author’s private key. 4. i. If The Host receives at least t affirmative responses then it reconstructs the session key, decrypts the file and sends it to A along with the message Read Access FileID Granted. The Host also informs every author with the message Read Access TransID Granted. ii. If The Host does not receive at least t affirmative responses then it informs A with the message Read Access FileID Denied, and every other author with Read Access TransID Denied. 5. The Host encrypts the file again with a new random session key and generates new headers. For edition access: 1. A sends The Host an Edit FileID message, along with a text description of the changes he/she wants to make to the document. 2. The Host sends every other author the message Edit FileIDTransID A, along with the description of the changes and the corresponding header for the contacted author. 3. Every author excepting A replies with a message Allow TransID (giving permission) or Deny TransID (denying permission), depending on his/her decision. Messages Allow
TransID also include the header content, decrypted with the author’s private key. 4. a. If The Host receives at least t affirmative responses then it reconstructs the session key, decrypts the file and sends it to A along with the message Edit Access FileID Granted. The Host also informs every author with the message Edit Access TransID Granted. Go to step 5. b. If The Host doesn’t receive at least t affirmative responses then it informs A with the message Edit Access FileID Denied, and every other author with the message Edit Access TransID Denied. The process is aborted. Go to step 9. 5. A receives the decrypted file, edits it and sends back the changes (the result of a “diff” operation) to The Host along with the message Changes FileID. 6. The Host forwards the changes to all other authors along with the message Changes TransID (including those who replied with a denial). 7. Every author except for A replies with a message Allow Changes TransID (giving its approval to the changes) or Deny Changes TransID (disapproving the changes), depending on his/her decision. 8. a. If The Host receives at least t affirmative responses then it commits the changes to the file and informs A with Changes FileID Committed, and every other author with Changes TransID Committed. b. If The Host does not receive at least t affirmative messages then it informs A with Changes FileID Rolled Back, and every other
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author with Changes TransID Rolled Back. 9. The Host encrypts the file again with a new random session key and generates new headers. A new shared signature binds A and The Host. The old file is deleted. Sending a description of the intended changes at the beginning of the edition process allows for an early stop if changes are not going to be approved by the minimum number of authors required (steps 1-4). Two timeout values may be set (users should be aware): •
•
An author response timeout: if an insufficient number of authors do not reply on time then the transaction is rolled back. An edition timeout: if A does not send back the changes made to the file in time then the process is aborted by The Host. This prevents authors from holding the document for too long. Good values for the timeout can vary from several hours to many days, depending on the scenario.
Figure 3 and Figure 4 show a read and edition attempt by author A, respectively. For the sake of simplicity only one author is required to give his/ her approval. Two possible results are depicted in each figure.
Dividing the Information into Parts This scheme can be extended in the case of documents that can be divided into parts, such as text files. We will call those parts document sections. Depending on the scenario it can be convenient that a given author cannot access all document sections. This can be easily achieved by using different session keys for different document sections. Each header will then contain a share for the session key of every document section he/she has permission. The Host’s header will contain a complete copy of every session key used. Note
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that the metadata section must be accessed each time a read/edit action is performed. This section must be therefore encrypted with a different key, which will be included in The Host’s header too. The reconstruction process of any session key is carried out in the same way as explained before. For proper authentication purposes, a different shared signature should exist for every document section. The corresponding signature should be updated after modification of a section.
Mobility Considerations Application of the scheme to a mobile scenario is straightforward, as long as client devices support public key cryptography and document edition. The scheme does not change: documents are stored at a central Host, with mobile clients accessing them as usual. Obviously clients must be connected to Internet at the time of access. Note that when asking for approval after a change on a document has been proposed, clients only receive the differences with the original instead of the whole document. This feature nicely fits mobile scenarios, since wireless connections are usually slower. What’s more, the use of mobile technologies along with the scheme will clearly improve users experience, since the approval process can be managed on real time. Offline periods are a common problem when facing the mobile scenario: clients are suddenly cut off and cannot be reached. Let us consider three interesting situations. 1. An online client is granted edit access to a document while online, but it is offline at the time of sending the changes back (step 5 in the edition access procedure): a smart implementation should allow the user to edit the document as desired and keep the result until connectivity is recovered. The changes should be sent then to The Host in a transparent way. That is similar to how email clients work.
A Pervasive Polling Secret-Sharing Based Access Control Protocol for Sensitive Information
Figure 3. Read access example: (a) Access granted (b) Access denied
2. A client is offline when a change notification is sent by The Host (step 6 in the edition access procedure): little can be done in this case. The client should get the notification when going online again. 3. An online client receives a notification asking for approval (either for access or changes commit), but it is offline at the time of emitting its verdict: as in case 1, the application
should remember the verdict until it can be sent to the Host. As can be learnt from these situations, it is important to manage connectivity issues in a transparent way, so user’s activity is interfered the least possible.
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Figure 4. Edit access example: (a) Access granted (b) Access denied
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Security Considerations Note that after each access attempt The Host file reencrypts the file and generates new headers. This is possible thanks to The Host’s header present in the headers section. The reason for re-encryption is preventing the exchange of shares among authors. To explain this, suppose that, for a threshold t, t+1 authors join forces to gain illegal access to the file (without notifying The Host). One of the authors might request access, while the other t might deny it. After the process, these authors already own their share and can communicate them in order to reconstruct the session key. Establishing a new session key and new shares avoids the problem. To this end, The Host is required to generate a header with a complete copy of the current session key for further re-encryption. Authenticity of the file is assured by the shared signature, as long as one of the signers is The Host (if The Host’s private key wasn’t compromised, of course). If an author modifies its local copy without permission then the hash in the signature will not match that of the file content. Privacy in communications is achieved by using SSL or TLS, which also guarantee authenticity of the messages. Any incoming message from a finished transaction should be immediately discarded by the receiver in order to prevent malicious actions. To run such protocols the client device should support public key cryptography, which should not be an issue given the state of the art in commercial devices.
Possible Applications Implantation of the scheme may be desirable on scenarios in which several organizations or individual must collaborate altogether towards a common goal, but there does not exist a mutual sense of trust, whatever the reason and, furthermore, the information handled should not be made public. We now show two examples, both settled in a commercial scenario.
In the first example we have two enterprises that collaborate on one or many shared projects, like the release of a new product, or even a fusion. There are many commercial documents, such as strategic plans, action lines, etc., that should only be known by some key members of the two firms (both boards of directors, advisers, delegates, etc.). In addition, any modification of those documents should only be done after agreement or ballot. Mutual mistrust, especially among firms that compete in the same strategic market, might lead to the adoption of a mechanism like ours. The second example uses the hierarchical version of Shamir’s Threshold Scheme. It was mentioned in Section Background that one or many shares can be given more value than others: the secret could only be reconstructed then if a given number of those important shares were used. Let us consider a single firm. The president, or the most important stakeholders, might be given each one important share, thus controlling the private document(s) evolution. The leader or supervisor of a workgroup might also take advantage of our scheme.
CONCLUSION This work introduces a novel access control mechanism for documents that need high privacy, such as classified governmental files, medical files (Lederman, 2004) (Peterson, 2005) (Tang, 2008) or financial information. The proposed mechanism grants access to the protected information only when a minimum number of authorized users agree on the action. This is achieved by using secret sharing techniques. A header for every user is added at the beginning of the document. Each header contains a share for the symmetric key (session key) used to encrypt the private information. In order to keep shares private each header is encrypted using an asymmetric algorithm along with the public key of the respective user, so only he/she can obtain the share.
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Decryption of the document requires a virtual rendezvous of a given minimum number of users, avoiding the necessity of a physical meeting to authorize the access to the private information. A protocol for this is presented. It uses SSL, TSL or an equivalent protocol to protect communications. A shared digital signature is attached at the end of the document to keep record of the users responsible for the last edition. The mechanism can be extended so access permissions to individual sections of the document can be given by encrypting every section with a different session key. The scheme nicely fits mobile scenarios, since all participating users can receive every notification on real time, making the process more dynamic.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT We would like to thank the reviewers for their valuable ideas and suggestions. This work has been partially funded by grants from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (TIN2008-01117), Junta de Andalucía (P06-TIC-1426, P08-TIC-3518, FQM 0211 and TEC2006-12211-CO2-02), and in part financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
REFERENCES Anton, A. I., Earp, J. B., He, Q., Stufflebeam, W., Bolchini, D., & Jensen, C. (2004). Financial privacy policies and the need for standardization. Security & Privacy, IEEE, 2(2), 36–45. doi:10.1109/MSECP.2004.1281243 Atkinson, R. (1995). IP Encapsulating Security Payload. ESP. Blahut, R. E. (1984). A Universal Reed-Solomon Decoder. IBM Journal of Research and Development, 28(2). doi:10.1147/rd.282.0150
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Brickell, E. F. (1989). Some ideal secret sharing schemes. J. Combin. Math. Combin. Comput., 9, 105–113. Brickell, E. F., & Davenport, D. M. (1991). On the Classification of Ideal Secret Sharing Schemes. CRYPTO’89 Proceedings. Callas, J., Donnerhacke, L., Finney, H., Shaw, D., & Thayer, R. (2007). OpenPGP Message Format. RFC 4880. Chen, L., Gollmann, D., Mitchell, C. J., & Wild, P. (1997). Secret sharing with reusable polynomials. In Information Security and Privacy. New York: Springer. doi:10.1007/BFb0027925 Dierks, T., & Rescorla, E. (2008). The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol, Version 1.2. IETF. Fiege, L., Zeidler, A., Buchmann, A., Kilian-Kehr, R., Mühl, G., & Darmstadt, T. (2004). Security Aspects in Publish/Subscribe Systems. Third International Workshop on Distributed Eventbased Systems (DEBS’04). JEDI. https://jedivcs. sourceforge.net/ GnuP.G. http://www.gnupg.org/ Kohl, J. T. (1989). The use of Encryption in Kerberos for Network Authentication. In Advances in Cryptology - CRYPTO’ 89 Proceedings. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg. Lederman, R. (2004). The Medical Privacy Rule: Can Hospitals Comply Using Current Health Information Systems? In Proceedings of the 17th IEEE Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems. Lucas, M. W. (2006). PGP and GPG. US: No Starch Press. Luo, Y.-A., Si, Y.-L., Liu, W.-Y., & Li, F. (2008). Shared Signature based on Elliptic Curve and its Application In Electronic Cash.
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McEliece, R. J., & Sarwate, D. V. (1981). On Sharing Secrets and Reed-Solomon Codes. Communications of the ACM, 24(9). doi:10.1145/358746.358762 Menezes, A., van Oorscht, P., & Vanstone, S. (1996). Handbook of applied cryptography. CRC Press. Numao, M. (1999). Periodical Multi-secret Threshold Cryptosystems. ASIACRYPT’99. OpenSSH. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www. openssh.org/ Pastor Franco. (1998). José & Sarasa López, Miguel Ángel. Criptografía Digital: Fundamentos y Aplicaciones. Publicaciones Universitarias Universidad de Zaragoza. Paterson, K. G., & Yau, A. K. (2006). Cryptography in Theory and Practice: The Case of Encryption in IPsec. Springer-Verlag. Pesonen, L. I., Eyers, D. M., & Bacon, J. (2007). Encryption-enforced access control in dynamic multi-domain publish/subscribe networks. ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, 233, pages 104-115. Pesonen, L. W., Eyers, D. M., & Bacon, J. (2006). A Capability-based Access Control Architecture for Multi-Domain Publish/Subscribe Systems. SAINT, 2006, 222–228. Peterson, M. G. (2005). Privacy, Public Safety, and Medical Research. Journal of Medical Systems, 29(1). doi:10.1007/s10916-005-1106-y PGP. http://www.pgpi.org/ Pietzuch, P. R., & Bacon, J. M. (2002). Hermes: A Distributed Event-Based Middleware Architecture. 22nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, (pages 611-618). Radu, C., Govaerts, R., & Vandewalle, J. (1997). Efficient Electronic Cash with Restricted Privacy.
Schneier, B. (2003). Practical Cryptography. Wiley & Sons. Shamir, A. (1979). How to share a secret. Communications of the ACM, 22(11), 612–613. doi:10.1145/359168.359176 SourceSafe. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ library/3h0544kx%28VS.80%29.aspx Srinathan, K., Tharani Rajan, N., & Pandu Rangan, C. (2002). Non-perfect Secret Sharing over General Access Structures. INDOCRYPT 2002. Subversion. http://subversion.apache.org/ Tang, X. (2008). Personal health care and medical treatment information and protection of privacy right. Frontiers of Law in China, 3(3), 408–422. doi:10.1007/s11463-008-0019-3 Wang, C., Carzaniga, A., Evans, D., & Wolf, A. L. (2002). Security issues and requirements for Internet-scale publish-subscribe systems. Proceedings of the Thirtyfifth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-35). Wang, H., & Wong, D. S. (2008). On Secret Reconstruction in Secret Sharing Schemes. 54 (1). Zhuo, C., Zhengwen, Z., & Nan, J. (2008). A Session Key Generator Based on Chaotic Sequence. Computer Science and Software Engineering, 2008 International Conference on, 3.
KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS GnuPG: A GNU software application that provides privacy and authentication in communications between two persons. It is mainly used as a complement for email applications. It uses the OpenPGP Message Format. It is the open-source equivalent to PGP. OpenPGP: Message Format: A standard that defines a file structure to be handled by GnuPG and similar software applications.
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PGP: A commercial software application similar to GnuPG. It is compatible with the OpenPGP Message Format standard. Public Key Cryptography: A cryptographic paradigm in which every individual owns two bound keys: a public and a private key. What is encrypted with a key can only be decrypted with its counterpart. Public Key Cryptography has helped to evolve security and privacy in the digital era, especially on Internet. Secret Sharing: A cryptographic technique that allows regenerating a secret by computing separate pieces of information.
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Shared Signature: A cryptographic technique that allows signing a piece of information by binding two different signers together. SSL: A protocol that provides privacy and authentication in communication between two hosts. Its last version is 3.0, which later evolved into TLS 1.0. Symmetric Cryptography: A cryptographic paradigm in which the same key is used to encrypt and decrypt information. TLS: A protocol similar to SSL. In fact it is an evolution of SSL 3.0. The current version is TLS 1.0.
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Chapter 13
Mobile Location-Based Recommender: An Advertisement Case Study Mahsa Ghafourian University of Pittsburgh, USA Hassan Karimi University of Pittsburgh, USA
ABSTRACT Mobile devices, including cell phones, capable of geo-positioning (or localization) are paving the way for new computer assisted systems called mobile location-based recommenders (MLBRs). MLBRs are systems that combine information on user’s location with information about user’s interests and requests to provide recommendations that are based on “location”. MLBR applications are numerous and emerging. One MLBR application is in advertisement where stores announce their coupons and users try to find the coupons of their interests nearby their locations through their cell phones. This chapter discusses the concept and characteristics of MLBRs and presents the architecture and components of a MLBR for advertisement.
INTRODUCTION With the exponential increase of cell phone users in the past several years, more specifically cell phones with location-aware capabilities, the parameter of “location” has become an integral component of mobile applications. (Bellotti, et al., 2008) conducted a survey and reported that mobile Internet is permeating into different location-based applications such as train schedule, weather report, and restaurant finding. Among DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch013
the available location-based applications on cell phones, maps are the most popular means of user interface (Meng & Relchendbacher, 2008). Current mobile phones, which support a higher bandwidth and localization (Baus, Cheverst, & Kray, 2005) are paving the way for the emergence of a new class of systems, which we call mobile location-based recommenders (MLBRs). MLBRs combine information on user’s location with information about user’s interests and requests to provide useful recommendations based on location via mobile devices. Many diverse applications can benefit from MLBRs; these include health (e.g.,
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Mobile Location-Based Recommender
recommending nearby hospitals), education (e.g., recommending nearby libraries), and e-commerce (e.g., recommending clothing stores with special offers). The goal of MLBRs is to recommend mobile users with information which is of their interest and needs using their current location. MLBRs are beneficial to individuals in that they save their time in exploring the needed locationbased information by receiving automatic recommendations that meet their needs and preferences. For instance, for a user who is interested in the stores that have items of his/her interest on sale, an MLBR can recommend such stores while the user is driving and getting close to each. In this chapter, we describe a MLBR for advertisement (mainly coupons search) and present a prototype for recommending coupons. The objectives of the paper are: (a) to understand the infrastructure and components of MLBRs, (b) to become familiar with the range of technologies appropriate for MLBRs, and (c) to understand important issues for designing and developing MLBRs. The structure of the paper is as follows. The structure of the paper is as follows. In Section 2, related works are discussed. Section 3 overviews the MLBR concept and its relationship to recommender, navigation, and mobile services. Section 5 and 6 describes an application of MLBR in m-commerce and a scenario for MLBR-Coupon. In section 7 and 8 MLBR-Coupon architecture and components and a prototype MLBR-Coupon for advertisement are presented. Section 9 provides the conclusion and future research.
RELATED WORKS Among the various available MLBR applications, some are extensions of current mobile applications with the parameter of “location” as another way of injecting data into the decision process. (Yu & Chang, 2009) presented a personalized MLBR for tour planning. Sightseeing spots, hotels, restaurants, and other points of interest (POIs) to tour-
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ists are recommended based on tourist’s location, time, and personal preferences and needs. (Yang & Wang, 2009) developed an architecture using WEB2.0 services for restaurant recommender. In this research restaurants are recommended to users based on their location that is obtained via Global Positioning System (GPS). (Hinze & Buchanan, 2006) presented a MLBR for tourists called Trip Information Provider (TIP). TIP provides a user with general information based on their location, personal profile, and their travel history once they have entered a museum. Moreover, users are informed of scheduled events such as opening hours of a museum. (Rashid, Coulton, & Edwards, 2008) presented a system which provides location-based information/advertisement for mobile users. By implementing the system in a supermarket, nearby customers are provided with the latest information on products as well as special offers, using Bluetooth. SMMART (Kurkovsky & Harihar, 2005) is another context-aware system which provides users with recommendations or promotions in a given retail store, considering user’s preferences. (Bellotti, et al., 2008) presented Magitti, a leisure guide, which automatically recommends its user a leisure activity. It predicts user’s future activity based on context and their patterns of behavior, and then recommends a useful activity considering user’s preferences. (Park, Hong, & Cho, 2007) developed a map-based personalized recommendation system, which collects context information, location, time, weather upon a mobile user request, and provides the user with a proper service on a map. The POI recommender presented by (Horozov, Narasimhan, & Vasudevan, 2006) is another mobile recommender which provides its users with recommendations on POIs (e.g., restaurant) considering their location and preferences. In this chapter, we present the architecture of MLBR-Coupon and discuss a prototype MLBRCoupon where stores coupon promotions are recommended to users. MLBR-Coupon facilitates accessing to stores with coupons on products/
Mobile Location-Based Recommender
Table 1. MBLR characteristics from application perspective Applications/Services
Features
Users
Scale
Advertisement Tourist Guide Education Navigation/POI Health
Localization Recommendation Personalization Contextawareness Adaptation
General populations Special needs Youth Students Tourists
Outdoor Neighborhood Campus City County State Country Indoor Buildings
services of interests using “location” as the main search criterion.
MOBILE LOCATION-BASED RECOMMENDER (MLBR) MLBR encompasses three main services: recommender services, navigation services, and mobile services. MLBR recommends to mobile users location-based information relevant to the application, such as location of stores, real estates, restaurants, learning resources, and recreation facilities and provides them with navigation services, i.e., routes and step-by-step directions to reach the recommended location. Figure 1 shows the relationships among the recommender, navigation, mobile, and MLBR services. Recommender services provide users with recommendation on different information. An example recommender service is store recommender, restaurant recommender, and tourist guide. Mobile services provide mobile users with information relevant to their location. For example, smart phones provide users with their current location. Navigation services provide users with navigation assistance, such as locating destinations, computing an optimal route (e.g., shortest distance or fastest time) between the origin and destination, and providing step-by-step directions to reach the destination. MLBR services are at the intersection of recommender, navigation, and mobile services. This
implies that MLBRs are services that provide mobile users with location-based recommendations, e.g., nearest shoe store to user’s current location, and navigation services, e.g., fastest route to the nearest store. A MLBR employs user’s location, obtained through either GPS or user entry on mobile devices (increasingly smart phones) to provide a variety of location-centered functions. In MLBRs, both a mobile platform and a web-browser platform can be considered for delivery of content to the user; the web-browser platform would be of interest when the user prefers not to deal with the constraint nature of mobile phone screens.
MLBR CHARACTERISTICS MLBR can used in different applications and provide users with several features. Table 1 illustrates the characteristics of MLBR from application perspective. Applications/Services. There are currently many applications that are benefiting from MLBRs. Examples of these applications include advertisement (e.g., recommending nearby stores that have items of user’s interest and needs), tourist guide (e.g., recommending nearby tourists attractions), education (e.g., recommending nearby libraries), navigation/POI (e.g., recommending POIs and routes to reach them), health (e.g., recommending nearby hospitals), and social
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Table 2. MLBR characteristics from implementation perspective Technologies
Positioning
Communication
Outdoor: GPS Bluetooth DR Cell-based Indoor: RFID A-GPS Bluetooth Cell-based
Short range: Bluetooth Medium range: Cell Large range: Wi-Fi
Decision Spatial Analysis
Outdoor: GIS Indoor: CAD
Platform
Android iPhone WHERE
Mobile Device
Cell phone Smart phone PDA Laptop
networking (e.g., recommending to meet nearby friends). Features. MLBRs may include a variety of features to support the specific requirements of applications. However, regardless of the application requirements, common features in MLBRs include localization, recommendation, personalization, context-awareness, and adaptation. Localization refers to the ability to determine current location of the user. Recommendation is the ability to automatically send location-based information to the user. Personalization refers to the ability to prepare location-based information based on user’s preferences and interests. Context-awareness is the ability to recommend information based on the context, such as location (indoor or outdoor), time (day or night), and weather (rainy or sunny). Adaptation is the ability to adapt to user’s changes of behavior/preferences/interests. Users. MLBRs can provide recommendations to users with different needs and preferences. Examples users are general population using incar navigation systems, people with special needs using specialized navigation systems, youth using friend finder, students using a system for recommendations on learning resources, and tourist using tourist guide. Scale. MLBR can provide services at different scales based on the application requirements. In outdoors, MLBRs can be at the scale of a neighbor-
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Data Outdoor: Road Sidewalk POIs Indoor: Hallway POIs
Common Functions
Geocoding Map matching Buffering Proximity Routing
Architecture
Issues
Centralized: Stand-alone Decentralized: Client/Server Distributed
Scalability Extensibility Interoperability Privacy Screen size
hood (e.g., recommending nearby stores), campus (e.g., recommending libraries within a campus), city (e.g., recommending houses within a city), county (e.g., recommending tourist attractions within a county), state (e.g., recommending cities with certain stores within a state), and country (e.g., recommending universities within a country). On the other hand, in indoors MLBRs are confined to the scale of buildings. Examples of such MLBRs are mostly limited to navigation systems for indoors. MLBR characteristics from implementation perspective are illustrated in Table 2. These characteristics include technologies, data, common functions, and architecture. Technology. Developing a MLBR requires combination of different technologies, including positioning, communication, decision spatial analysis, platform, and mobile device. Positioning technology can be categorized into two groups: those that operate in outdoors and those operate in indoors. Positing technologies for outdoors mainly include GPS, Assisted GPS (A-GPS), cellular network, Bluetooth, dead reckoning, and IP address and positioning technologies for indoor include Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), A-GPS, Bluetooth, cellular network, and IP address. Communication technology facilitates transition of information between the different com-
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ponents of a MLBR, such as client and server(s). Examples of communication technologies are Wi-Fi, cell, and Bluetooth. Spatial/Decision analysis technology facilitates checking “locations”, “attributes”, and “relationships of features” in spatial data via several techniques to address spatial queries. Spatial/ Decision analysis technologies are categorized into indoor and outdoor. Geographic information system (GIS) is used for outdoors and is a system that captures, stores, retrieves, analyzes, and displays geographical information (Cowen, 1988). Computer-Aid Design (CAD) is used for indoors and is a system for drawing and updating maps (Curry, 2004). LBS Platform is used for implementing MLBRs. Examples of such platforms include WHERE, and Android, and iPhone. WHERE is a location-based platform developed by uLocate that supports several programming languages such as PHP, Cold Fusion, and Ruby. While WHERE provides developers with an easy and opensource implementation environment, it has slow performance and its functionalities are limited to navigation and POI finder. Android is another open-source platform for developing locationbased applications (Meier, 2009) and can be used via different platforms, i.e., Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux (i386). iPhone, which has been emerged in the past couple of years, allows connection to and utilization of third party location-based systems vendors. Examples of such vendors are Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and Skyhook Wireless (Sadun, 2009). Despite the advantages of iPhone, such as supporting more than one programming languages and enabling access to several external geospatial resources, it suffers from some limitations, such as non-interoperability and high expenses for both developers and users. Mobile device. Since MLBR provides recommendations for mobile users, it needs to be accessible via a mobile device, such as cell phone, smart phone, PDAs (personal digital assistant), and laptops.
Data. MLBRs require two types of data: spatial and non-spatial. Spatial data for outdoors include geometry and topology of roads and sidewalks, POIs (e.g., geographic position of a restaurant), and spatial data for indoors include geometry and topology of hallways and POIs (e.g., location of a classes). Non-spatial data for outdoors include street names, road and sidewalk segments’ length, road segments’ speed limit, number of lanes, and users’ profile/preferences. For indoors nonspatial data include hallway segment’s length, POIs’ type (e.g., restrooms, drinking fountain, and room), accessibility information, and users’ profile/preferences. Functions. Common MLBR functions include geocoding, map matching, buffering, proximity, and routing. Geocoding is “the conversion of analog maps into computer-readable form” (Clarke, 2003) which is used for representing addresses on the map. Map matching is the process of finding the road/sidewalk segment (in outdoor) or hallway/ corridor segment (in indoor) on which the user is located, once his/her position through GPS or the complementary positioning service is determined. Buffering is “the process of generating a buffer zone from a point, line, or, area feature by offsetting a user-defined distance from these features” (Yeung & Lo, 2007). Routing is the process of computing a route between a pair of origin and destination based on criteria such as shortest path, fastest time, less number of intersections, and/or toll free. Architecture. MLBR’s architecture can be either centralized or decentralized. Centralized MLBRs are stand-alone systems where all computations are performed on a single device. Decentralized MLBRs are based on either client/server model, where a server is responsible for providing recommendations to the client, or distributed architecture in which more than one server supports the client with recommendations. Since in MLBRs, the client is usually a handheld
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device, such as a smartphone, which has limited computational capabilities, storage, and battery life, most MLBRs are based on client/server architecture. In such an architecture, the client is responsible for presentation tasks and the server is responsible for computations and database processing. Issues. Implementing MLBRs, with aforementioned characteristics, requires addressing several issues such as scalability, extensibility, interoperability, privacy, and screen size. Scalability refers to the capability of the MLBR to handle more operations as the number of clients increases. In client/server architecture, where different clients request to MLBR for receiving location-based recommendation, simultaneously, the response time is of importance. Clients expect to receive services (recommendations) immediately. Extensibility refers to the provision of being able to include additional functions in the MLBR as they deem necessary. Interoperability refers to the ability of different components of different MLBRs to work together. For instance, MLBR should be available for different clients regardless of the platform. Interoperable MLBRs must consider adherence to standards such as OpenLS (Open Location-based Services) defined by OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium). Privacy is another issue that needs to be addressed where user’s personal information, especially location, could be available in the database on the server. Screen size of mobile devices where information such as recommendations, maps, and routes is communicated with the user is another issue to be addressed when developing MLBRs.
MLBR IN M-COMMERCE MLBRs play a pivotal role in m-Commerce (mobile commerce). m-Commerce is defined as “the activities of consumers shopping using a mobile device such as a cell phone, Personal Digital Assistant or a combination cell phone-PDA device
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from anywhere any time connected to the Internet through a wireless network” (Zenebe, Ozok, & Norcio, 2005). MLBRs in m-Commerce are recommender systems that recommend products/ services which meet user’s preferences with respect to location and proximity to the mobile user (Horozov, et al., 2006). One prevalent application of MLBRs in m-Commerce is advertisement, where stores/vendors announce their products/ services through the Internet and consumers can access them through mobile devices equipped with geo-positioning technologies such as GPS. The mobile device (e.g., a smart phone) computes user’s location in real time and facilitates user’s location-based queries including nearby stores, routing, and directions to the stores. The advantage of MLBRs in advertisement is twofold. One, it is beneficial to consumers due to its “mobility”, “broad reach”, “ubiquity”, and “convenience” in localizing products and services of their interest (Zenebe, et al., 2005). Second, it is beneficial to companies since it allows them to broadcast their advertisements only once without incurring expenses of flyers and their distribution. An example MLBR in advertisement is MLBRCoupon which is coupons announcement with the goal of facilitating access to coupons on products/ services of interests using “location” as the main search criterion. While maps are the most popular means of submitting queries and visualizing results, screen sizes of cell phones hinder effective overlaying and presenting map and text data, simultaneously. To address this issue, the mapping and location-based nature of the service should be strictly behind the scenes unless the user explicitly requests map or direction data. On the web-browser side, a dynamic mapping interface is a suitable method of displaying data to the user, and the map could be the central delivery point for the data, both advertisement data, as well as the originating location of that advertisement data. A dual panemethod of displaying data would be required for the web-browser platform, in which the available
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stores (with distance from the user’s location) are listed separate from the individual store data (with relevant advertisements) on the map. On the cell phone side, there should be a simple interface to display the requested information. The location information is obtained through the GPS on the cell phone, or the address is entered manually when the GPS signal is not strong enough or obscured, and then the search keyword(s) are entered. Once user’s location along with search keyword(s) are submitted, stores with matched advertisement keyword(s) are returned. A fine tuned display for each store and subsequently each advertisement is then enabled from that point, as well as an affordance for the user to go back, or to exit.
SCENARIO Mary is a subscriber of a MLBR-Coupon that provides advertisement services on her cell phone. One of the services is searching for coupons on items of her interest. The following is her experience with the MLBR-Coupon for advertisement services. Upon selection of the MLBR-Coupon for advertisement services on her cell phone, Mary requests for receiving information on coupons of the nearby stores as she drives away from her home. The MLBR-Coupon searches for the stores in her proximity and upon finding one explores it for available coupons. Once a coupon is found, the MLBR-Coupon sends the relevant information to her cell phone and displays the store on the map along with the shortest path (a preferred routing criteria pre-selected by Mary) to reach the store.
ARCHITECTURE AND COMPONENTS In this section, we present an architecture for MLBR-Coupon that provides personalized location-based recommendation on coupons The
MLBR-Coupon architecture consists of four main components: client, server, databases, and web mapping services. Figure 2 shows the architecture of MLBR-Coupon. Client- is either of mobile type or web-based type. Mobile client is specialized location-based software installed on cell phones which can obtain position data using the GPS receiver on the phone and passes it on to the server to be used in other functions. In this way, all functions would be stored on the phone, and transmission times would be short, as the only transmission needed would be short text and small images. The other client type is a browser environment where location information is simply placed in a standard HTTP request, and the entire code for displaying the information would be returned to the device, in a form similar to HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript on webbrowsers. However, with this client, the amount of exchanged data for each request is large, even though some elements of the page such as images (logos, separation lines, or background images) are cached. Its advantages are that the entire application resides on the server and any changes to it would simply be realized by the client the next time they are accessed. This is in contrast to the mobile client where the client software must be updated constantly to be consistent with the standards set by the service provider. The overhead differences between the two clients are significant, and there may be some advantages or disadvantages in using one client type over the other. Server- is the main component of MLBRCoupon which consists of three major modules: the web server, which provides standard static markup text to the web client or mobile client; the serverside scripting language; and the database(s). The database module stores all of the non-presentation oriented data and parses data from the database along with presentation data into a cohesive package (i.e., HTML, XML or otherwise) delivered to either the web client or the mobile client. Whether the client is a web client or a mobile client, the
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pages or structured text are created on-the-fly when requested from the user, upon searching the system. The web server along with the server-side scripting language play an important role, since it is the conduit to retrieve data from the database before it is sent to the user. In addition to using a server-side scripting language to retrieve data and display it in a meaningful way, applying a framework system which would aid with the data extraction, as well as displaying information in a proper style is essential. As mentioned earlier, in addition to the client-side software that can access the service, a web-based version is also needed. This is similar to the web-based platform for delivery in the mobile device, where the web application would be downloaded anew, in standard web style, upon the user’s request. When there is no other option, other than a traditional compiled application which resides on the client’s device, this method is preferable considering the speed of Internet and modern computers in general. In this situation, as was mentioned earlier, the user would be prompted to identify their location, or a location in which they would like to search around. The system, through geolocation via IP address, would estimate the user’s closest metropolitan area, which may be beneficial for some users, who choose to search around their closest area. Once a location is determined, the user’s queries are sent to the server. The server sends the query to the spatial database, which resides on a web mapping service’s database (e.g., Google Map), for geo-computations, if it is deemed necessary. Then, it sends the query to the local database in order to retrieve the requested coupon. Upon completion of all computations and retrieval, a webpage with a dual pane, one showing a list of stores and the other showing marked stores on a map, is displayed to the user. Web Mapping Service contains a map database and supports functions such as mapping, geocoding, overlaying, routing/directions, and proximity. Google Maps is an example Web Mapping Service.
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A scalable database structure is imperative to handle increase in data volumes. There are two options to handle geospatial data, which is an important aspect of this database. One option is by using the server-side scripting language, which takes time to calculate complex computations, and another option is by using geospatial plugin for databases. The latter option has a higher performance than the former option, which is extremely important considering numerous concurrent requests.
A PROTOTYPE MLBR-COUPON A prototype of the MLBR-Coupon for advertisement was developed and tested. The database schema of the prototype is shown in Figure 3. The logic of how the prototype searches coupons based on user’s location is shown in Figure 4. The prototype has three main interfaces: one for the mobile user on a cell phone, one for the web user, and one for the administration side. Each interface has a typical use-case associated with it. The mobile user would be in the field, looking for advertised coupons. They would activate the phone, search for deals nearby their location using a keyword, find the deals, and utilize them at the point of sale, or store them for later use. The web user would be interested in deals around a certain location, perhaps their current location which they would enter into the system. They would search for deals that match their interests by entering a search keyword, and the deals would be returned in a hybrid map interface, involving both map and coupon data. The administration interface is for businesses to enter and manage their data in order for it to be searchable on the client-side interfaces. For the prototype, we chose rapid development rather than a best-case scenario for the end user. This allowed us to focus on the structure of the system rather than the underlying necessity of learning a mobile device programming framework, such as J2ME, Java’s mobile framework
Mobile Location-Based Recommender
running on many consumer-grade cellular phones. A framework called WHERE, presented itself as the framework of choice, considering that it fit all of the requirements we had identified for rapid prototyping. WHERE is a platform developed as a mobile web browser and compared to common mobile web browsers, it supports a location parameter injected into the POST data by the application (“WHERE Developer”, 2008). This location data is obtained by the GPS receiver built into the phone, and delivered using a programming API to the application. The steps of how WHERE could be used for developing MLBR applications/services are as follows. Once the WHERE application is started, the phone begins to obtain a GPS signal in the background. The user is then displayed an index of applications that they have added, which are essentially links to specialized WHERE URLs. Upon selection of the MLBR-Coupon, the client phone checks to ensure that the current location has been obtained by the GPS. If no GPS data is available, the client phone will prompt the user to enter an address. Once a location is obtained, the coordinates (e.g., latitude and longitude) are passed through POST data in the HTTP request to the server for the WHERE application. The server takes the POST data and processes it using the server-side scripting language to deliver content relevant to the user’s location. Then, the location is sent in the form of POST data upon any new page request. If the user requests for information on a store’s coupon, WHERE explores MLBR-Coupon database for coupons, and if they are found, the pertained information along with a map is presented to the client. WHERE provides several services to content providers to help them develop applications that are helpful to users and are easily accessible. Application directory is a service mostly requested by the user. Other features of WHERE include mapping and routing. WHERE supports several APIs that provide multi-point mapping for applications. This is also the case for routing via car or on foot.
There were several languages involved in producing the application, but the main logic and the processing was the open-source server-side scripting language PHP (“PHP”, 2008). It operates well with the Apache Web server (“The Apache Software Foundation”, 2008) and therefore is optimized for web language parsing, but can also be run from the command line, and therefore could be utilized in the future for off-line operations such as database maintenance. PHP is a very versatile language for writing web applications and allowed us to create other web pages in XHML/JavaScript as well as the Jin language, employed by WHERE. Jin, however, is not standard, although it is similar to HTML (not XHTML). The major difference is that it is much more demanding with respect to proper syntax. If the syntax is not correct, it will simply crash the page (or the phone, if testing on a device), and does not degrade gracefully similar to standard browser-based HTML pages do. It has some rudimentary JavaScript-like functionality, but it is basically used for displaying pages. Despite all of its shortcomings, WHERE (utilizing Jin) is open source and is used to implement a quick prototype. CakePHP (“CakePHP”, 2008) is a PHP framework which utilizes the MVC (Models, Views, Controllers) paradigm. The framework was used to develop the administration page in order for registered users to add, view, modify and delete products, services, stores, and company information. CakePHP’s method of handling the interaction between the Models, Views and Controllers is not unique but enabled much functionality with little effort. Issues like error handling, data verification, and data cleaning were all performed by the CakePHP framework. Google Maps (Google Maps API Concepts”, 2008) is a particularly integral part of the clientside web interface. Due to the need for a hybrid mapping interface, it was important that the map takes up a large portion of the display to display all of the correct spatial information along with the relevant information to the search keyword.
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The Google Maps API which is an open source API and facilitates the flexible design was used to display the map, the locations of the user, the relevant store locations, the contextual information for each store location (coupon information), and the directions from the user’s location to the store locations. The Yahoo User Interface (YUI) (“The Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI)”, 2008) libraries are open source web libraries which take the burden of cross-browser functionality planning and debugging from the shoulder of the developer. YUI obfuscates browser quirks so that the developer can focus on what they want something to do in the browser, instead of how it will look on different browsers. We used YUI for page layout, AJAX functions, animation, and display of layered features. The layout utilized YUI Grids, which split up the page in predetermined “grids” using CSS. Using AJAX, we implemented a bookmarking and printing system for the user to remember and print their coupons (bookmarking deprecated in favor of printing). Using the animation features of YUI, we implemented a small animation which directed the user’s eye to the text-entry bar to enter their address. PostGIS (“What is PostGIS?”, 2008) is the database extension that is installed into the PostgreSQL which supports geo-computations. In order to calculate which stores are near a user, PostgreSQL, with PostGIS’ support computes a bounding box around the user. Then each location found within the bounding box is calculated for two reasons. Firstly, to ensure that the location actually is inside the radius specified by the user (some could be in the corners of the box), and secondly, is to sort and display the locations by distance. These calculations are done by the database, since the database is compiled and is much faster at geospatial calculations than the server-side scripting language which by nature, is not compiled. There were several key queries from the database that demonstrate the level of complication
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derived from using such a complex database, and complex calculation of geospatial data. The first and foremost query, which is used on both the mobile device application as well as the web application, is the search query. The query has several variables which change per query and change the output of the query. They are search Longitude and Latitude, search Radius Distance, and Search Keyword. As mentioned earlier, the query first searches for entities with latitude and longitude within the bounding box of the current position’s latitude and longitude, plus and minus north/south, east/west given the search radius distance. This bounding box is created by using the “expand” function. Then it does the more intense calculation of ensuring the resulting locations are located inside the actual radius, not just the bounding box. This precise calculation is done by the “distance_sphere” function. It would be possible to do more precise calculations using the “distance_spheroid” function, but for the precision that we are looking for (0.1 miles), it is not necessary. The Search Keyword is self explanatory, but how it is used in the database needs explanation. For each product and coupon row, there is a column which keeps an extended index with the abbreviated version of all the words (e.g., “bottles” would be converted to “bottle”) in the description and title of the row. This is updated on creation, and on edit, all performed using triggers in the database. The Search Keyword is converted to a query statement by creating abbreviated versions of the words in the search string, and then comparing it to the index. This is done using the “ts_query” function which converts the keywords to a “stunted” form. The comparison is then between the new “ts_querried” form of the search and all of the products and coupons from all of the locations returned in the first part of the search, it then returns the locations containing each of the results. If the element found is a product, only the store location information will be returned, but if the element was a coupon, both the store location and the coupon information will be returned. The
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reason for this is that the service is a deal finder, not a product finder. The reason businesses would want to input their products, is so that they can get more matches for their particular store, but there is really no reason for the product to be returned.
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE RESEARCH MLBRs are extremely important in the future of mobile computing. User can find their desired information based on their location. In this chapter, we presented an infrastructure and components of MLBRs and a prototype of MLBR-Coupon which can help users to find appropriate stores, with desired coupons, based on their location. Future research related to the prototype can focus on supporting users with both further options and better quality of service. To do this, one area of future research would be using user’s preferences and their feedback on their previous experiences for various purposes, such as providing user with the required information based on their purchasing habit and preferences. Also, extending the system with a social networking component will allow users to share their experiences with each other. Furthermore, the system could be used as a shopping schedule assistant, i.e., the user sets up their schedule, such as daily schedule, on the cell phone, and the system can provide them with information on the nearby stores on a specific day (and time) considering their schedule.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank Mathew Mendick for his assistance in developing the prototype in this project.
REFERENCES Apache Software Foundation. (n.d.). The Apache Software Foundation. Retrieved 8 Sept. 2008, from http://www.apache.org Baus, J., Cheverst, K., & Kray, C. (2005a). A Survey of Map-Based Mobile Guides. In Mimg, L., Zipf, A., & Reichenbacher, T. (Eds.), Map-based Mobile Services. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. doi:10.1007/3-540-26982-7_13 Baus, J., Cheverst, K., & Kray, C. A. (2005b). Survey of Map-Based Mobile Guides. In Mimg, L., Zipf, A., & Reichenbacher, T. (Eds.), Map-based Mobile Services. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. doi:10.1007/3-540-26982-7_13 Bellotti, V., Begole, B., Chi, E. H., Ducheneaut, N., Fang, J., Isaacs, E., et al. (2008). Activity-Based Serendipitous Recommendations with the Magitti Mobile Leisure Guide. Paper presented at the the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human Fctors in computing systems, Florence, Italy. CakePHP. (n.d.). CakePHP. Retrieved 8 Sept. 2008. Clarke, K. C. (2003). Getting Started with Geographic Information Systems (4 ed.)Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Education. Cowen, D. (1988). GIS versus CAD versus DBMS: What Are the Differences? Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, 54(11), 1551–1555. Curry, S. (2004). CAD and GIS: Critical Tools. Retrieved 10 Oct. 2009, from http://images.autodesk.com /apac_grtrchina_ main/files/4349824 _CriticalTools.pdf Google Maps, A. P. I. Concepts. (n.d.). Google Maps API Concepts. Retrieved 8 Sept. 2008, from http://code.google.com/ apis/maps/ documentation/
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Hinze, A., & Buchanan, G. (2006). The Challenge of Creating Cooperating Mobile Services: Experiences and Lessons Learned. Paper presented at the the 29th Australasian Computer Science Conference, Hobart, Australia.
Sadun, E. (2009). The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK: Pearson Education Inc. What is PostGIS? PostGIS Retrieved 8 Sept. 2008, from http://postgis. refractions.net/
Horozov, T., Narasimhan, N., & Vasudevan, V. (2006a). Patent Application Publication.
Where Developer. (n.d.). Where Developer. Retrieved 8 Sept. 2008, from http://developer.where. com/ jin/dev welcome.jin
Horozov, T., Narasimhan, N., & Vasudevan, V. (2006b). Using Location for Personalized POI Recommendations in Mobile Environments. Paper presented at the the International Symposium on Applications on Internet Kurkovsky, S., & Harihar, K. (2005). Using Ubiquitous Computing in Interactive Mobile Marketing Meng, L., & Relchendbacher, T. (2008a). The State of the Art of Map-Based Mobile Services. In Meng, L., Zipf, A., & Winter, S. (Eds.), Map-Based Mobile Services. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-37110-6_1
Yahoo. (n.d.). Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI). Retrieved 8 Sept. 2008, from http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/ Yang, F., & Wang, Z. M. (2009). A mobile locationbased information recommendation system based on GPS and WEB2.0 services. Transactions on Computers, 8(4), 725–734. Yeung, A. K. W., & Lo, C. P. (2007). Concepts and Techniques of Geographic Information Systems (2 ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.
Meng, L., & Relchendbacher, T. (2008b). The State of the Art of Map-Based Mobile Services. In Meng, L., Zipf, A., & Winter, S. (Eds.), Map-Based Mobile Services. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-37110-6_1
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Park, M. H., Hong, J. H., & Cho, S. B. (2007). Location-Based Recommendation System Using Bayesian User’s Preference Model in Mobile Devices. Paper presented at the 4th International Conference, UIC 2007. PHP. Retrieved 8 Sept. 2008 from http://www.php.net
Zenebe, A., Ozok, A. A., & Norcio, A. (2005, 22-27 July 2005). Personalized Recommender Systems in E-Commerce and M-Commerce: A Comparative Study. Paper presented at the HCII 2005, The 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Nevada.
Postgre, S. Q. L. Retrieved 8 Sept. 2008, from http://www.postgresql.org/ Rashid, O., Coulton, P., & Edwards, R. (2008). Providing Location Based Information/Advertising for Existing Mobile Phone Users. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 12(1).
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Location-Based Services (LBSs): Prepare location-centric information and deliver information to user’s current location. Geo-positioning sensors, to determine user’s current location, and wireless communications, to deliver information, are the most important components of LBSs.
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Recommender: Any system that provides recommendation based upon user’s preferences. Mobile Location-Based Recommender (MLBR): A recommender that provides locationcentric recommendation and delivers recommendation to user’s current location. Navigation: The process of moving from one location to another.
M-Commerce: Refers to the process of conducting commerce through wireless communications and mobile devices. Mobile Computing: Refers to the development on and utilization of mobile devices. Location-Based Social Networking (LBSN): A LBS for Social Networking (SN) in that members of the network share information based on their current location with one another.
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Chapter 14
Success Cases for Mobile Devices in a Real University Scenario Montserrat Mateos Sánchez Universidad Pontificia de Salamaca, Spain Roberto Berjón Gallinas Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain Encarnación Beato Gutierrez Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain Miguel Angel Sánchez Vidales Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain Ana María Fermoso García Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain
ABSTRACT Mobile devices have become a new platform with many possibilities to develop studies and implement projects. The power and current capabilities of these devices besides its market penetration makes applications and services in the area of mobility particularly interesting. Mobile terminals have become small computers, they have an operating system, storage capacity so it is possible to develop applications that run on them. Today these applications are highly valued by users. Nowadays we want not only to talk or send messages by mobile terminal, but also to play games, to buy cinema tickets, to read email… We can bring these capabilities in our pocket. The University may not be aware of this fact. The students, due to their age, are the main users and purchasers. In this sense, this article will present three applications we have developed for mobile devices. Nowadays they are being used in Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca. All of them work on a university scenario and use different kind of services. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch014 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
Success Cases for Mobile Devices in a Real University Scenario
INTRODUCTION In recent years mobile devices (mobile phones, PDAs, ...) have suffered a large and fast evolution; this fact has caused companies and individuals demanding information and services over mobiles environments. These devices have evolved considerably since their birth; the great progress came in 2001, when appeared the first devices with LCD color display. In same year but in Japan it was released the third-generation phones (3G) that they were based on UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System); main innovation was the incorporation to the device of a second camera to video calls. Nowadays these 3G devices are the most used. Current mobile devices are very powerful. They are capable of transmitting, receiving and storing information, connecting to networks and running applications. Therefore, they are a very interesting platform for new research projects. University may not be aware of this fact. Students are the main users and purchasers. In this sense, this article will present three applications we have developed for mobile devices. They are being currently used in Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca. All of them work in the university scenario and they use different type of services. Structure that we will follow in our chapter is: first we are going to show with data that there is a continued demand for mobile devices. Market penetration and demand of applications and services for this type of devices are growing up. We’ll continue with a summary of the most important mobile services: voice services, messaging, multimedia, video, applications that run over mobile devices and data services. After that, we’ll emphasis on location based services (LBS) which is the main technologies available to carry out the location: cells and GPS (Global Positioning System). Then we will describe the main technologies to develop applications for mobile devices. Neverthe-
less mobile devices have some constraints which are necessary to be on mind when developing applications or services for mobiles. After that, we’ll explain some study cases that we have developed and implemented in a university scenario; next paragraph we are going to explain briefly these three applications. The first application is MovilPIU: it is a mobile application that provides to students the same services that those provided in UIP (University Information Points). Some of these services are free (request student record by example) and other services are paid (such as request certificates, purchase dining tickets). Also we’ll explain how we have resolved the payment of these services. MovilPIU is a data service and it is accessible through browsing. The second one that we describe is MoBiblio: we have developed this application to improve and to speed up the management of basic services of a library; exactly loan, return and renewal of books in the library of Universidad Pontificia of Salamanca. It is based on both message services: push and pull-push; besides it uses data services through browsing in order to provide other services such as access to the library catalogue. HouseMobile is the third application that we are going to study; help student to find an accommodation in Salamanca. It is based on location services; the application displays maps with both the position of the student (mobile device) and the position of accommodation searched; also, it provides to the user the guidance over a map from her current position towards the position of accommodation. Finally, we will finish describing what improvements we are going to incorporate to the above applications. Besides we will describe the actions that we are going to undertake at the present and in the future as regards mobile applications and services: Android and new development frameworks.
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Figure 1. Mobile phone penetration in the European Union (October 2007, lines per 100 inhabitants)
BACKGROUND
Figure 2. Mobile phone penetration in Spain
Mobile Device Expansion Last decade the use of mobile phones has suffered a large growth and its market penetration has been spectacular. For example, in Spain in 2007 was exceeded for the first time the 100 lines per 100 inhabitants (Comisión del Mercado de las Telecomunicaciones, 2007). Specifically in 2007 Spain reached 109 lines per 100 inhabitants (see Figure 1). A few years ago it was unthinkable to reach the barrier of 100 lines. In the Figure 2, it can be seen a Pyramid Research survey in 2007 (Pyramid research, 2007). This study shows the dramatic growth of mobile lines in Spain. This growth has not happened so fast ever with other technologies, and it notes that the market is at a very high saturation levels.
de Paz, & Corchado, 2009). All existing applications are based on one or more of the following basic services (Open Mobile Alliance, 2008) (Telefónica, 2007): •
Mobile Services The enormous market penetration of these devices has caused that the characteristics and possibilities of them are exploited to provide new services and new applications (Sánchez Vidales & Beato Gutierrez, 2008) (Bajo, et al., 2009) (Bajo, de Paz,
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Voice service. It was the first service in mobile terminals. It is mainly used for communication between people and it is the main service. This service justifies the possession of a terminal. Nowadays, it represents 80% (Gartner, 2007) of operators business. Short Message Service. Popularly it is known as SMS. This service allows sending text between mobile terminals with a maximum of 160 characters. Despite being short text messages, the service is the most
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popular in history of mobile telephony. Gartner (Gartner, 2007) says that in 2006 936,000 million SMS were sent in the world and it is expected to reach 2.3 trillion messages in 2010. Multimedia Message Service (MMS). Much of current mobile phones can store and send ringtones, logos, photographs, graphics or music. These have become small multimedia consoles. Multimedia message reception is not as popular as sending SMS. On the one hand because not all terminals have this service and on the other hand because of the price. In 2006 there were sent 8300 million multimedia messages (less than 1% of total) and in 2010 they will reach 47,400 (less than 5%) (Gartner, 2007). Location service. This service is based on the nature of GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) network (Dru & Saada, 2001) (Schiller & Voisard, 2004). The coverage of a network operator is established on the basis of cells, the size of the cells is dependent on the density of antennas. In urban areas where the number of antennas is large, the size of the cells is smaller; in this case the location is established with an accuracy of about 100 to 500 meters. Obviously this is less accurate when we are on roads or populations with a lower density of antennas.
Location service is available on all phones, but its precision is not very good and therefore the uses of this service are very limited. However, at present time there are mobile devices already incorporating GPS (Global Positioning System). GPS is a satellite navigation system that can determine the position of an object with accuracy up to centimeters, making it much more interesting. •
Video services. 3G/HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) terminals allow
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video calls and audio in real time. In addition, this service lets you send, receive and play video. Using this service, for instance, you can access to video-monitoring circuit through the mobile device or watch television. In any case, video service is not very popular, but in future, experts are betting on it. Mobile software applications. Mobile terminals have become small computers. They have a powerful processor, an operating system and storage capacity that make possible to run mobile applications on it. To develop this software we can use languages like J2ME (Java Micro Edition) (Sun. JavaMe) (de Jode, 2004), C++ or C# (Wigley, Moth, & Fod, 2007). These features expand significantly the number and type of projects can be done on this new platform. Data service. The last generation of mobiles has the possibility of Internet connection. So, this connection can be the base for other services. For example, e-mail and browsing Web are now two of the main applications of data service and it is expected to grow in the future.
Location-Based Services (LBS) Location service is a service increasingly used to provide applications and services because users request services fit to their location context. LBS (Schiller & Voisard, 2004) use the actual position of the terminal to provide the service. With LBS the communication and interaction is possible in two ways; the user provides his actual context to the services provider, that is, he provides his position in an automated way and his preferences and necessities; then the provider of services provides to the user the requested information fitted to her necessities and to her actual positioning. There are several definitions of the locationbased services concept; for some authors (Schiller
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& Voisard, 2004), LBS is a service of information that is available through mobile devices and it uses the positioning of the device to provide the service. With LBS it is possible to develop services and applications available through the mobile devices and these applications could give answers to questions such as where am i?, what are there nearby? and how can i go? Some possible applications of the LBS (Dru & Saada, 2001) are for example emergency services to locate a user in situations where he cannot give his position, tourist services to indicate user the nearby interesting places or tracking services to use it in packet transport, etc. The first LBS was message-based services, SMS and MMS (Fangxiong & Zhiyong, 2004); these services were very limited because of technological restrictions. The terminals that supported these services were simple, with poor user interfaces that did not offer many possibilities for presentation of information. Nowadays LBS are developed to be supported by powerful terminals and others technologies (Lei & Hui, 2006) such as WAP browsing (Open Mobile Alliance, 2008), JavaMe (Sun. JavaMe) or i-mode (DoCoMo, 2005). The LBS has an add-value when these interact with maps services to provide geographic information; by example, to provide guidance information between the location of mobile device and others geographic points, or to provide services that are about specific distance walking from the position of the terminal. The LBS emerge (Shiode, Li, Batty, Longley, & Maguire, 2004) from 3 technologies: mobile technology, Internet and geographic information systems with spatial databases. Considering who is the entity that begins the service, the LBS could be classified into two groups: pull-services and push-services. With pull-services, the user carries out the request for the service. With push-services the information or service is not directly requested by the user.
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All location-based service has four components (Schiller & Voisard, 2004): •
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Mobile device. Devices from which the user requests services and where the results are returned. Mobile communications network. Mobile phone network through which the users send from the mobile device both the user data and the service request. Also through it, the answer to information requested by the user is received. Positioning component. With this component is possible determining the device/ user position. The position could be obtained in several ways. Service-data provider. This component is the responsible of processing the request service and it also provides different services, such as calculating the position, finding a route, finding specific information of interest nearby for a user, etc. Provider may content the requested information by the user, but this information usually will be requested by the data provider to others contents providers (yellow pages, directories, etc).
There are different methods or technologies to compute the positioning of a user/mobile device; we should choose one technology or other depending on the requirements of the application to develop: •
Network-based positioning (Kaaranen, Ahtiainen, Naghian, & Niemi, 2001). This technology uses the mobile communications network. The positioning is carried out by the base stations; the devices send signals to the base station and this is detected by them. It is possible to calculate the positioning because the coordinates of base stations are known and it is possible to measure (or at last to approximate) the
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distance between the terminal and the base station. To compute the distance, three or more received signals should be measured. There are different methods to measure the positioning: AOA (Angle of Arrival), TOA (Time Of Arrival), E-OTD (Enhanced Observed Time Difference). With this technology the accuracy of positioning is variable (between 50 mts and kms); at urban zones the accuracy is higher, but in rural zones it could be lower. Terminal-based positioning (Agency, 2002). It is also named as positioning by satellite. This technology uses an infrastructure of satellites of earth orbit and a receiver terminal. Terminals to compute the position are based on the received information through the signals of radio of 3 or more satellites. This technology has a higher accuracy (between 5 mts and 40 mts) than those based on network mobile positioning, but its use is restricted to outdoor. It is independent of mobile phone network. GPS is the most extended but there are others such as Glonass or Galileo. Local positioning (Krishnamurthy & Pahlavan, 2004). This is a positioning method oriented to constrained areas; it is based on transmission of signals to short distances. It is basically used for locationbased services in indoors such as shopcenters, museums, super-stores, etc. Some of these methods are based on WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network), Bluetooth or RFID (Radio Frequency Identification).
Technologies of Development Despite the fact that the mobiles devices and terminals have advanced considerably, nowadays they have some restrictions yet; we have to consider these restrictions when we are going to develop them. The mobile devices (pda, phones,...) have usually low-power computing, small memory
size, small screens with low resolutions, limited capacities of input, run-time depending of the battery, low and variable bandwidth, among others. So, it is necessary new technologies to develop and to exploit applications and services for mobile phones. Some of this technologies are WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), J2ME or JavaMe (Java 2 Micro Edition) or the development platform of Windows Mobile among others. WAP (Open Mobile Alliance, 2008)(WAP 2.0. Technical White Paper, 2002) is an Open International Standard for applications that uses wireless communications. It is the specification of a set of protocols to normalize the way in which wireless devices can access and interact with services and information easily and quickly. WAP is oriented to mobile devices with displays restricted, small keyboards and low bandwidths. This protocol allows to operate to applications and services over a large number of networks (CDMA -Code Division Multiple Access-, WCDMA -Wideband CDMA-, UMTS -Universal Mobile Telecommunications System-, GSM -Global System for Mobile Communications-, …). It is basically oriented to present contents in the terminal. The version 2.0 presents important improvements with regard to version 1.0. One of these improvements is a better design of content over portals using XHTML and WCSS. WAP is supported by most of mobile devices having a micro-browser. Another possibility is to develop the services using J2ME or JavaME (Sun. JavaMe) (de Jode, 2004) (Lei & Yin, 2004) (Yuan, 2004), that is, with the “mini” version of Java. It is a Java platform specially oriented to devices with limited capacities over the personal computer version. It is oriented to the develop applications running on mobile phones, although it is possible to develop client/server applications which interact through network services. On the other hand, in order to develop applications running on mobile devices with terminals based on Windows Mobile (Wigley, Moth, & Fod, 2007), it must be possible use the platform
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of Microsoft using Microsoft Visual Studio and Windows Mobile SDK; with these technologies, it is possible to produce software in native code (Visual C++) and in managed code (Visual C#, Visual Basic .Net). The Windows Mobile Platform offers features such as data connectivity seamless and it has enhanced security.
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ACADEMIC APPLICATIONS FOR MOBILES IN A UNIVERSITARY SCENARIO Next, we are going to expose three projects1 based on different mobile services and that they have been development to provide several services to the university community.
MovilPIU This first project is an academic application. Students can access a range of services offered by the University (student record requesting, obtaining certificates, purchase of dining tickets,...) using their smart card in the UIP. Our goal is to facilitate students to access to these services. MovilPIU allows access to these services from a computer, a mobile phone or a PDA. For the project will be necessary to achieve:
Figure 3. MovilPIU Architecture
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Identify the student: Nowadays the University community has a user account to access to computers. Through this account the user is identified and authenticated. The same account will be used to identify users in MovilPIU using Active Directory. Study and implementation of services: MovilPIU must be able to present information to the user according to the device used to having access to it. We will use the following formats: WML, XHTML and HTML (Wugofski, Lee, Soo Mee, Watson, & Mee Foo, 2000).
Moreover, we need to work with the same information (databases) that we are now used by the UIP, so that the UIP will continue to function without making any changes. •
Payment: Some services in the UIP need a pre-payment. For example, if they wish to apply for a mark certificate, students will have to pay the amount of the fee. This payment will continue to be. We use the rules defined by Spanish banks for this payment and we use a Web application to manage this function.
Success Cases for Mobile Devices in a Real University Scenario
Figure 4. Mobile and Web user identification
Figure 5. MovilPIU application
Architecture MovilPIU The architecture used in MovilPIU is a three-tier design: Model, View and Controller (MVC). Communication between components, controller and model is through SOAP messages. Really the model is a Web service (see Figure 3). The answer to the user is obtained by transforming the XML information retrieved from the model using XSLT stylesheet. Different CSS are applied depending on user-agent. The supported formats are HTML, XHTML and WML.
Results MovilPIU As we can see in Figure4, the user must access via mobile or Web. After that, depending on the
user profile, it will be possible to execute different academic functions (Figure 5). MovilPIU is divided into three parts: “Academic Information” (Figure 6), “Certificates Request” (Figure 7) and “Dining tickets Request” (Figure 8). The application works by using the navigation, via mobile and via web, through links. Parts in which the application is divided are described below.
Academic Information The application allows students to request their academic record. The student can choose between the different graduates that he has studied in the University.
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Figure 6. Academic Information
Figure 7. Certificates request
Figure 8. Dining tickets request
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Certificates Request In this option MovilPIU allows students to request certificates for their qualifications in the University.
Dining tickets Request This option allows to buy dinning tickets. Not only students but also teachers and staff can access to this option and to buy dining tickets. The purchase is recorded and is sent to the bank at the end of the month. The price is showed near to the kind of ticket.
MoBiblio Nowadays most of libraries are computerized; its management and access to its catalogue are both carried out digitally; otherwise, most of them use
the Web to provide some of their basic services, such as general information request, catalogue access, queries about the state of the loans and reservations and renewals of loans and reserves, among others. Recent studies have concluded that only 40 per cent of people have available an Internet connection, and therefore, these services could be available for these people from where they are connected to Internet. If we consider that 100% (Pyramid research, 2007) of users usually use mobile phones, if the basic services could be available on mobile devices, then these services could be available to any user at any time in anywhere (Figure 9). We propose the architecture of a platform to provide the basic-services of a library using mobile devices, which are at the same time so advanced and so restricted. Besides, these services are developed and implemented for a particular library2 using the architecture proposed. With this
Figure 9. Schema with the state of a library before and after Mobiblio
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Figure 10. Push message schema to provide alert services
platform basic-services of a library could improve in dramatically in quality and available. The platform proposed has a subsystem of messaging to provide through the mobile phone some basic-services that nowadays libraries provide through traditional post or e-mail. Specifically alerts or warnings services related to loan service, for example the expiry date of a loan, or availability of a reserved book/resource (Figure 10). From such alerts/warnings, the user could carry out several actions; the user could return the loaned resource/book or in case of an alert about the reservation go to the library to loan the book that it is available. To develop this subsystem we have used a push message service, in which the library is the actor that initiates the communication. In these cases the user should have been signed up for the services previously in order that the library could have both the mobile phone number and the user authorization. In the case of expiration date of a resource, the user has the option of renewing the resource;
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this is possible sending another SMS, so in this case the communication is established bilaterally. Another bilateral service that it has been implemented is the renewal of a loan and the query of state of loans and reserves of a user (Figure 11). To develop these services it has been used a pullpush schema; the user is the actor that initiates the communication, and the library answers back with another message showing if the renewal has been possible or not. In case of query of information, the queried information will return. The platform has other subsystem to provide browsing services through the development of a WAP portal (Figure 12). This subsystem has been implemented because, there are several services more suitable for the user using browsing than messaging; some of them are querying the catalogue, updating the user information, or requesting general information about the library.
Success Cases for Mobile Devices in a Real University Scenario
Figure 11. Pull-Push message schema to request actions or information
Figure 12. Schema to provide services by means browsing (to query catalog, to request general information, ...)
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Architecture The architecture proposed to develop and to implement this platform (Figure 13) is based on MVC (Model-View-Control) pattern of design; this pattern separates the part that implements the business logic from which generates the presentation of contents and from the component that takes on all the client requests. With this architecture
each component is independent of others, so to carry out a migration of this platform to another library, only it would be necessary to change the data access. The model handles the access to the database using JDBC (Java Database Connectivity), so it makes the searches, insertions and updates of the data. Controller has been implemented by means of a class that extends the HttpServlet class. This
Figure 13. Proposed architecture to develop the platform to provide basic services of a library.
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Figure 14. Display with a WAP page with general information about the library (a) and with the main menu (b)
component receives request from users and after this and depending on the type of these requests, it carries out a connection through of the factory of models and it carries out the calling to the model. The view will generate the contents that are displayed on the mobile phones in a dynamic way using JSP (Java Server Pages) technology, All messaging services have been implemented using the same architecture, being the model component, the same that it has been used for developing browsing services. With push services, in which the library is the actor that it initiates the communication, the request to the controller is carried out by the master class periodically (for example, one time for each 12 hours); the master class carries out the request about which are the loans out of dated or which are the available reservations. In this case, the view will not generate jsp pages, but it will generate messages that they are transmitted to mDirectSender (Tempos21. MDirect, 2007) and this one will send them to the phone operator and this one will send them to the user. In case of pull-push services, in which the user is the actor that initiates the communication, it will be the servlet mContentService (Tempos21. MContent, 2007) which receives the SMS from the user through phone operator; after that, the back message is built by the view with the requested
data to the model; finally the message will be send to the phone operator by means of mDirectSender (Tempos21. MDirect, 2007).
Description of Services Being in mind the nature of the available services, we could distinguish two types: services of data available through browsing (Figure 12, Figure 14) and services available through messaging (Figure 10, Figure 11). The most important browsing services are: •
Access to the catalog to query the resources/books (Figure 15); it is possible carry out queries by different fields (author, title, isbn, …) in the same way that for online or web catalogues but now using the mobile. If the resource is loaned or is not available, in this moment, through the same page, it is possible to carry out the reservation of the book. Query of personal reservations (Figure 16); with this option is possible to query reserved resources or books. The user has to authenticate with her name/surname and her number of user. Query of loaned books/resources (Figure 17a); with this service, the user could query
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Figure 15. Wap-page to query a book on the catalogue and page with a result
•
the books loaned; and also to renew the loan. As in the previous case, in order to query this information the user has to authenticate. Querying and updating the personal information (e-mail, address, phone number, …)(Figure 17b).
The services available by means messaging are: •
Services of alerts of loans out of date and alerts of available reservations; they are push services and the user receives in their mobile phone an alert SMS warning about
the event occurred. In these SMS, it is provided the type of service and the title and author of the book. Next messages are examples of this type of messages, mobiblio:Loan out-of-date:Title:Operating Sysem. Author: Stallings. mobiblio:Available Reservation: Structure Data in C. Author: Joyanes. •
Services of querying of loans, reserves of books, and renewal of loans; these services are based on pull-push technology and with them the user through a SMS makes a request of information or asks for an ac-
Figure 16. Wap-Page to authenticate a user and Wap-Page with a result of a query about the reservations of a user
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Figure 17. Diplay with the results of a query about loaned books (a) and diplay to update the personal information of a user (b)
tion to the system. The system provides to the user the information requested through a SMS (loaned resources or available reserves) or the result of carrying out the action (if it was possible or not the renewal). The SMS to make a request to short number could be like some of the next,
mobiblio loan mobiblio reserv mobiblio renewal In the same way, some of possible answers from the library could be like these, mobiblio loaned book: title: XXX expiration date: XXX<br />
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Figure 18. Before situation and actual situation with the development of the new service<br />
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mobiblio reserved book: title: XXX expiration date: XXX mobiblio inform: correct renewal<br />
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HouseMobile HouseMobile is the result of the development of a project that consists on applying the mobile technology to the search of accommodation for university students (see Figure 18). Some universities have available services of help for finding accommodation, but most of them require users should go to the department of the university that offers this service; If the service is available through the Web, then users should have available a personal computer with Internet connection. This way of searching accommodations could means an additional problem to users because of it is also possible users could unknown the city, and therefore, it could be difficult for them to place the position of an accommodation in a map or to calculate the approximate distance and route between points in a map. The developed application could have two types of users; on one side users that offer their accommodations; these users could introduce their accommodations through mobile devices. On the other hand, university students that requires an accommodation; students could carry out the searches using several criterions: number of rooms, shared, with heating, centrally situated, zone, etc.; the application places the accommodation on a map and calculates the distance and route from actual position of student (mobile device) to the accommodation position. The application is clearly a pull location-based services that incorporates maps service. Because of the requirements of application we decided to develop it using WAP technology; besides we decided to use the mobile communication network for calculating the positioning because nowadays, there are not many phones with GPS, and because the application will be used in urban zones where the accuracy is high.<br />
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Technologies The Java language has been used to implement the application. Exactly we have used Java Servlet apis, as well as, JSP (Java Server Pages) to implement the web pages that will be displayed on phone. JDBC has been used for the connection and communication of the application with the Oracle database, where it is stored all managed information of accommodations. According to (Haifeng, 2004), J2EE is a technology that satisfies the requirements of Wap-based LBS. The J2EE (Sun. J2EE) solutions reduce the cost and the complexity of a distributed development of several levels, which could be more portable and quickly developed and deployed. On the other hand, the application provides both the positioning of accommodations on a map and the route from the positioning of the user to the accommodation. To implement this functionality we have used the location service that provides mobile phones network. We have also used the developed APIS with java that some telecommunications companies (Tempos21, 2004) have available3 for this purpose. For implementing the services of maps and guided to the user we have used the apis of maps that Google (GoogleMaps) has available. Exactly we have used the GoogleStaticMaps services and Driving Directions services.<br />
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Architecture The application developed (Figure 19) has the four components of an LBS: mobile device, mobile communications network, positioning component and services-data provider. The mobile device should connect to services/ data provider through the mobile network. This device will be a thin-client that will carry out the request of service to a Web server through a microbrowser. The services/data provider will be an application that runs on a Web server. This application<br />
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Figure 19. Architecture used for developing and implementation of the LBS<br />
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has been developed using a MVC (Model-ViewController) pattern to separate the part that implements the business logic from which generates the presentation of contents and from the component that takes on all the client requests. In this way, if some component or part should be changed, it will be possible to carry out the change without modify the rest of components. The controller component will be the component that receives the requests of clients; it has been developed using Servlets. When the controller receives a request, it will pass it to the model and when the model has the answer it will pass<br />
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it to the view component. The view component will generate the presentation of contents using JSP. As we can see in Figure 19, the model component has three independent components: data, maps and positioning. Depending on the request of user, this will be passed to a model or other. If the request is for finding an accommodation with specific characteristics, the request will be passed to the data model. If the request is for positioning in a map of one accommodation, then it will be transmitted to maps model; and if it is for guiding of a user from her position towards one accom-<br />
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Figure 20. Search of an accommodation<br />
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Figure 21. Positioning in a map of the accommodation and guided to the user<br />
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modation, then the request will be transmitted to both maps and location model. We can see that our system is LBS with a multilevel architecture which favors the reutilization. It would be valid for any other business, only it would be necessary to change the logic of data access, the rest of elements (maps, positioning,..) could be reutilized. In Figure 20 and Figure 21 we can see some web pages of application in the mobile device; we can see the type of map and the type of guided provided to the user too.<br />
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FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS Recently, new mobile systems are borning, such as iPhone or Android. For example Android, led by Google, is a software stack for mobile devices including, among other things, a new java virtual machine optimized for such devices. With Android, developers create their applications using Java programming language. Because it is an open and free platform,<br />
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it has very good expectations in terms of market penetration. Today, it is being considered as a reference when developing new applications. Also iPhone OS, that it is based on a variant of the Darwin Operating System. It could be considered to develop applications, but in this case applications are oriented to multimedia and entertainment.<br />
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CONCLUSION In this chapter three mobile applications have been exposed. They have been developed in a universitary scenario to provide academic services. We have taken on the requirement of a particulary University (Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca). Now these services are used by all the university community. At present new platforms of development as Android or iPhone are emerging. Also new phones that will work with this platforms are coming out. With the appearance of these new technologies the<br />
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possibilities of research in this area are increasing significantly.<br />
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Gartner. (2007). Gartner. Retrieved Junio 2009, from http://www.gartner.com GoogleMaps. (n.d.). GoogleMaps. Retrieved Mayo 2009, from http://code.google.com/intl/es/ apis/maps/documentation/ Haifeng, M. (2004). Distributed GIS for Agriculture based on J2EE. Geomatics and Information Science, 2(29), 142–143. Kaaranen, H., Ahtiainen, A., Naghian, S., & Niemi, V. (2001). UMTS Networks, architecture, mobility and services. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Krishnamurthy, P., & Pahlavan, K. (2004). Wireless Communications. Telegeoinformatics. CRC Press, 11-142. Lei, W., & Yin, S. (2004). J2Me technology on mobile information device. Modern computer, 1, 17-20. Lei, Y., & Hui, L. (2006). Which one should be chosen for the Mobile Geographic Information Service Now, Wap vs i-Mode vs J2Me? Mobile Networks and Applications, 11, 901–915. doi:10.1007/s11036-006-0057-y Mikkonen, T. (2007). Programming Mobile Devices: An Introduction for Practitioners. New York: Wiley. Open Mobile Alliance. (2008). Open Mobile Alliance. Retrieved August 2009, from http://www. openmobilealliance.org Open Mobile Alliance. (s.f.). Open Mobile Alliance. Retrieved from http://www.openmobilealliance.org Pyramid research. (2007). Retrieved July 2009, from http://www.pyramidresearch.com Sánchez Vidales, M. A., & Beato Gutierrez, E. (2008). Proyectos de Innovación Tecnológica y Chip. Publicaciones Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca.<br />
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Schiller, J. H., & Voisard, A. (2004). Location-based services. San Francisoco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. Shiode, N., Li, C., Batty, M., Longley, P., & Maguire, D. (2004). The impact and penetration of Location Based Services. Telegeoinformatics. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Sun. J2EE. (s.f.). J2EE. Retrieved May 2009, from http://java.sun.com/j2ee/overview.html Sun. JavaMe. (s.f.). JavaMe. Retrieved July 2009, from http://java.sun.com/javame/index.jsp Telefónica. (2007). MovilForum. Web para desarrolladores. Retrieved July 2009, from http:// www.movilforum.com Tempos21. (2004). Innovación en aplicaciones móviles. Retrieved April 2009, from http://www. tempos21.es Tempos21. LBroker. (s.f.). LBroker. Retrieved April 2009, from http://www.tempos21.com/web/ files/productos/Lbroker.pdf Tempos21. MContent. (2007). MContent. Retrieved May 2009, from http://www.tempos21. com/web/files/productos/MContent.pdf Tempos21. MDirect. (2007). MDirect. Retrieved May 2009, from http://www.tempos21.com/web/ files/productos/MDirect.pdf WAP 2.0. Technical White Paper. (2002). From http://www.wapforum.org/what/WAPWhitePaper1.pdf Wigley, A., Moth, D., & Fod, P. (2007). Microsoft Mobile Development Handbook. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press. Wugofski, T., Lee, W. M., Soo Mee, F., Watson, K., & Mee Foo, S. (2000). Beginning WAP: Wireless Markup Language & Wireless Markup Language Script. Wrox Press, Ltd.<br />
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Yuan, M. J. (2004). Enterprise J2Me. Developing mobile Java applications. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR.<br />
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Mobile Devices: Phones and devices wireless to communicate using mobile network. Mobile Services: Services or possibilities available in mobile phones. Mobile Applications: Software applications running in mobile devices. Academic Services: Software applications to help students and academic organizations in their educational and administrative tasks. Development for Mobile Technologies: Technology to develop mobile applications. Mobile Library Services: Services offers by libraries available from mobile phones. Mobile Academic Services: Academic services offer by educational institutions available from mobile phones. Mobile Accommodations Services: Services of lodgment available from mobile phones.<br />
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ENDNOTES 1<br />
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These projects are included in Club de Innovación Universitaria project supported by Fundación Caja Duero, Caja Duero and Universidad Pontificia de Salamanc. Library Vargas Zuñiga, Universidad Pontificia of Salamanca. For this application we have used L-Broker API (Tempos21. LBroker) of Tempos21 company.<br />
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Chapter 15<br />
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Event Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks Sohail Anwar Penn State University, USA Chongming Zhang Shanghai Normal University, China<br />
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ABSTRACT Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have experienced an amazing evolution during the last decade. Compared with other wired or wireless networks, wireless sensor networks extend the range of data collection and make it possible for us to get information from every corner of the world. The chapter begins with an introduction to WSNs and their applications. The chapter recognizes event detection as a key component for WSN applications. The chapter provides a structured and comprehensive overview of various techniques used for event detection in WSNs. Existing event detection techniques have been grouped into threshold based and pattern based mechanisms. For each category of event detection mechanism, the chapter surveys some representative technical schemes. The chapter also provides some analyses on the relative strengths and weaknesses of these technical schemes. Towards the end, the trends in the research regarding the event detection in WSNs are described.<br />
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INTRODUCTION Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have gained significant attention in recent years, particularly with the proliferation of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) and with the advances in Nanotechnology which facilitated the development of compact and diverse sensors. These sensors are small nodes, with limited computing DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch015<br />
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resources and low cost hardware design. Thus, they are inexpensive compared to traditional sensors. These sensor nodes can sense, measure, and gather information from the environment. Then, based on some local decision process, they can selectively transmit the sensed data to the user (Yick, Mukherjee, & Ghosal, 2008). A wireless sensor network (WSN) in its simplest form can be defined as a network of devices called nodes that can sense the physical world and communicate the information gathered from the<br />
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Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.<br />
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monitored field (for example, an area or volume) through wireless links. Each node comprises components including controller, memory, communication, power supply and sensors. Original sensor data or some kind of processed and condensed information is forwarded, possibly via multi-hop relaying, to a sink node or base station, which can use it locally or route it to other networks through a gateway (Verdone, Dardari, Mazzini, & Conti, 2008). Although motion is possible, the nodes are generally static. They may or may not be aware of their location. The typical deployment scenario of WSN is depicted in Figure 1, where a number of sensor nodes are scattered in the monitored field. The sensor nodes collect data from the field and route the data to a sink node, which further relays the data to an infrastructure network. More than one sink is possible in some WSN applications. The ideal wireless sensor node is smart and software programmable, consuming very little power, capable of fast data acquisition, reliable, inexpensive, and needing little maintenance (Lewis, 2004). Unlike traditional wired and wireless networks, a WSN has its own unique design and resource constraints. Resource constraints include limited amount of energy, short communication range, low bandwidth, and limited computation and storage capacities in each node. Design constraints are application dependent and are based on the application requirements and monitored environment. The environment plays Figure 1. Wireless sensor network<br />
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a key role in determining the size of the network, the deployment scheme, and the network topology (Yick, et al., 2008). Selection of the optimum sensor for an application requires a good knowledge of the application and problem definition. Battery life, sensor update rates, and size are all major design considerations. Examples of low data rate sensors include temperature, humidity, and peak strain capture. Examples of high data rate sensors include strain, acceleration, and vibration. WSNs have a great potential for many applications such as military target tracking and surveillance, industrial process monitoring and control, natural disaster relief, biomedical health monitoring, hazardous environment exploration, seismic sensing, and home automation. Although, there exist so many types of applications, event detection mechanism is recognized as an indispensable component of the most applications which facilitate the efficient sensing of the physical world using WSNs. The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 of the chapter provides the relevant background material covering an overview of event detection in WSNs. This overview includes event definition and classification, key issues and challenges of realizing event detection mechanism, and so forth. Section 3, which discusses threshold based detection, surveys some representative realization techniques. Section 4 covers several schemes for pattern based complex event detec-<br />
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tion. Section 5 compares the techniques discussed in sections 3 and 4. The sixth section describes future research directions for event detection in WSNs. Finally, the last section concludes the chapter.<br />
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BACKGROUND This section identifies and introduces the different aspects of event detection in WSNs. This section brings forth the richness in the problem domain and justifies the need for the broad spectrum of event detection techniques.<br />
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Event Definition An event can be defined as an exceptional change in the environmental parameters such as temperature, pressure, humidity, etc. Thresholds like ‘temperature>90’ and ‘light>50’ are often used to detect the happening of some event. In this case, we presume that event has some significant characteristics that can be used as thresholds to distinguish between normal and abnormal environment parameters. An event can be further classified into atomic event and composite event. The events such as ‘temperature > 90’ or ‘light > 50’ are known as atomic events. Some other events have to be described and defined with more than one thresholds. For example, the occurrence of fire should satisfy some conditions such as ‘temperature > 100°C AND smoke > 100mg/L AND light > 500cd’ simultaneously, rather than a simple condition ‘temperature > 100°C’, ‘smoke > 100mg/L’ or ‘light > 500cd’ alone. Events, such as, fire which is a logic combination of two or more simple events are classified as composite events. Atomic events only require participation of a single sensor (say, temperature sensor) and composite events need two or more types of sensors for their detection (Kumar, Adi Mallikarjuna Reddy, & Janakiram, 2005).<br />
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Formally, a composite event can be defined as: E = F (σ1, σ2 , , σr ) , where σ1 through σr are atom events, and F is a function of Boolean algebra operators such as ‘AND’, ‘OR’ or ‘NOT’. Besides simple logic combination of atom events, other combination methods are possible. For example, in (Lai, Cao, & Zheng, 2009), temporal relationships among atom events are considered. Composite event can be defined this way: ‘the average temperature of room A rises above 30 and then after 10 minutes, the average temperature of room B also rises above 30.’ However, an event may occur in many other forms. For example, in coal mine monitoring scenarios, gas leakage or water osmosis can hardly be described by the overrun of specified attribute thresholds. Threshold based event definition is not very meaningful in these cases. An event can be a gradual and continuous change over time and space, or it may take on some complex patterns. Thus, it has no clear border with normal environment parameters. We refer to this kind of event as complex event.<br />
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Event Detection Realization WSN is a data-centric network. WSN applications can be classified into query-based, event-driven and continuous monitoring applications according to the way sensor data are collected. In a continuous monitoring application, individual nodes periodically send sensor data to base stations. In a query-based application, central entities (for example, servers and base stations) query nodes to collect sensor data. In an event-driven application, nodes send sensor data to base stations only when they detect an event (or potential event). Event detection is one of the most important tasks in WSN applications because it is an efficient way for mining meaningful information out of a huge volume of sensor data. Event detection mechanisms exist in all these three types of application patterns.<br />
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Traditionally, event detection mechanism is realized as a part of specific applications. Considering the necessity of event detection mechanism in many applications, it is now preferably realized as middleware that provides event service if the computational ability of the node is allowable. Application development for WSNs is easier with the help of suitable middleware. In some other application scenarios, event detection can be done in hardware much more efficiently than in software code running on the microprocessor. Thus, event detection mechanism is partly realized by hardware in these applications for high performance and low power consumption.<br />
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Event Detection and Sensor Data Characteristics Spatio-temporal correlation among the sensor observations is a significant and unique characteristic of the WSNs, which can be exploited to drastically enhance the overall event detection performance. The characteristics of the correlation in the WSNs can be summarized as follows (Vuran, Akan, & Akyildiz, 2004): • <br />
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Spatial correlation. Many typical WSN applications require spatially dense sensor deployment in order to achieve satisfactory coverage. As a result, several sensors record information about an event in the sensor field. Due to high density in the network topology, spatially proximal sensor observations always show some degree of correlation. Temporal correlation. Event detection application may require sensor nodes to periodically observe and transmit specific event features. The nature of the energyradiating physical phenomenon leads to the temporal correlation between consecutive observations of a sensor node. The degree of correlation between consecutive sensor measurements may vary according<br />
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to the temporal variation characteristics of a measurand. Another key aspect of any event detection technique in WSNs is the nature of the input data, which would come from sensor equipment. Input data is generally a collection of data instances. Each data instance can be described as a set of attributes (Chandola, Banerjee, & Kumar, 2009). The attributes can be of different types, such as, binary, discrete, or continuous. The attributes determine the applicability of specific event detection techniques. For example, different algorithms have to be used for continuous and binary data. An additional concern for event detection in WSNs is sensor data quality (Ni, et al., 2009). Due to the low cost and the possible harsh or hostile deployment environment, sensors are prone to failure. Faulty sensors are likely to report arbitrary readings that do not reflect the true state of observed physical process. These faulty sensors should be recognized on a timely basis, and should be excluded from the event detection process to ensure the event detection accuracy.<br />
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Challenges Performance parameters related to event detection applications include detectability, detection delay, and power consumption. An event may be undetected, or it is detected but the detection is associated with certain latency, or it is detected at a high energy cost. The design of an event detection mechanism with high detectability and low detection delay is by no means a simple task. For atomic event and composite event detection, defining and maintaining suitable thresholds is not easy. In many application scenarios, environment parameters keep evolving and a currently suitable threshold may be misleading in near future. For complex event detection, the exact notion of an event is different for different application domains, and<br />
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thus the algorithms used to detect complex event may take on very different forms. In fact, most of the existing event detection techniques solve a specific formulation of the problem. The formulation is induced by various factors such as the nature of the senor data, availability of training data set, type of event to be detected, and so on. Often, these factors are determined by the application domain in which the events need to be detected. Researchers have adopted concepts from diverse disciplines such as statistics, machine learning, data mining, pattern recognition, signal processing, and have applied them to detect specific events. The design of an event detection mechanism with high detectability and low detection delay is also constrained by the requirement that WSNs should respond to events happened at any time while maintaining ultra-low power consumption. Energy conservation is one of the primary concerns for WSNs since each node is battery powered in most typical deployments and a WSN must operate for at least a required mission time or as long as possible. Low maintenance is necessary to allow large scale deployments in many WSN applications, which is mainly prevented by low battery life. Event detection mechanism should always be efficiently designed to save energy and prolong battery life.<br />
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Related Topics Anomaly or outlier detection refers to the problem of finding patterns in data that do not conform to expected behavior (Chandola, et al., 2009). Anomaly detection is applicable to a variety of applications, such as intrusion detection, fault detection, and event detection. From the perspective of detection techniques, intrusion detection and fault detection have many similarities with event detection in WSN field. But they focus on different problem domains. Fault detection focuses on the health of WSNs themselves, while intrusion detection cares about security, and event detec-<br />
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tion endeavors to find anomaly in the observed objects of the WSN. WSN can be regarded as a domain-specific instance of event-based system, which is rapidly gaining importance in many application domains ranging from time-critical systems, system management and control, to complex event processing in e-commerce and security (Rozsnyai, Schiefer, & Schatten, 2007). Techniques discussed in related disciplines, like event-drive architectures and complex event processing, are worth our consideration. Information fusion arises as a response to process data gathered by sensor nodes. By exploiting the synergy among the available data, information fusion techniques can reduce the amount of data traffic, filter noisy measurements, and make predictions and inferences about a monitored entity (Nakamura, Loureiro, & Frery, 2007). Information fusion techniques are selected for use in event detection mechanism.<br />
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THRESHOLD-BASED EVENT DETECTION Both atomic event and composite event are detected by setting some thresholds for sensor readings. The most important point for this threshold-based detection is to choose suitable threshold values; otherwise users would not get the result they want.<br />
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Issues Related to Realization WSN users should provide each working node with suitable threshold values. These threshold values should be stored in the memory of each node and should be updated timely according to the environment changes and application requirements. Some interaction between sink and sensor nodes is needed to fulfill this task. The most suitable and naturally matched paradigm for this interaction is publish/subscribe. Event detection process starts when WSN users subscribe some specific events<br />
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of interest through sink nodes. Sensor nodes then report/publish these subscribed events to sink nodes when they are available. Database query technology is used in some popular realizations to facilitate the event description. Users specify events via simple, declarative structured query language–like SQL queries. For some applications like building structure monitoring, events could occur sparsely at unpredictable time and thus the nodes are mostly idle. Threshold based detection mechanism can be partly realized by hardware to meet stringent requirement for low power consumption.<br />
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A Survey of Solutions One famous realization of publish/subscribe paradigm for WSNs is Directed Diffusion (Intanagonwiwat, Govindan, Estrin, Heidemann, & Silva, 2003), which aims at addressing the event-based real-time queries by diffusing different event interests into the monitoring network and letting sensors report when occurrences of some specified events are detected. The Directed Diffusion approach does not explore the spatial or temporal correlations among the sensory data, and it relies on individual reports of sensor nodes according to the disseminated event interests. Database-like abstraction is used in most mainstream data-centric middleware, all of which support threshold based event detection. COUGAR project (Bonnet, Gehrke, & Seshadri, 2000) introduces a sensor database system and deals with three types of event queries: historical queries, snapshot queries, and long-running queries. The system employs threshold-based detection logic and encapsulates it into a set of asynchronous functions provided for users. TinyDB (Hellerstein, Hong, Madden, & Stanek, 2003) defines the event by a composition of various specified attribute thresholds. The event detection is carried out by comparing sensor readings of attributes with predetermined threshold values. DSWare (S. Li, Lin, Son, Stankovic, & Wei, 2004), another<br />
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data service middleware, explores the correlation among different sensor observations for event detection. Events are grouped into two different types: atomic events and compound events. Confidence functions are employed to strengthen the mechanism for compound event detection. A framework for distributed event detection using collaboration in WSN has been designed as a part of a component oriented middleware COMiS (Kumar, et al., 2005). An event based tree is constructed using publish/subscribe paradigm to accomplish collaboration. Kumar, et.al. (2005), define an event counter threshold for the certainty of each atom event, that is, an atom event is verified to happen only if predefined number of sensors in the tree detect its happening. If all the logic components (atom events) of the composite event are verified, the composite event is generated in the tree. They assume the WSN compose of nodes equipped with multiple sensors, and any sensor would fail to work for some fault or low energy. During the construction of the event based tree, the sensor capabilities of each node is checked and counted to make sure that all the nodes in the tree jointly have enough sensors to fulfill the event detection task. In this way, the goals of both simple event and composite detection are achieved when there exist failures and low energy nodes. An algorithm for constructing event detection sets that support composite event monitoring was proposed in (Vu, Beyah, & Li, 2007), and the k-watching concept was used to enhance the reliability of event detection. An event detection set is defined as a subset of sensors which jointly accomplish the event detection task. One or more event detection set is constructed according to some algorithm. The event detection set features that, if any atom event happens, at least k sensors in the detection set have the ability to detect it. Thus if no more than k-1 sensors fails for some reason when the event happens, at least one sensor can detect and report it. At any time, only one event detection set is active for event<br />
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detection task. During the operation time of the active event detection set, once a sensor detects that the current sensed value is above the threshold of its monitored property, it sends one bit ’1’ instead of the sensed value to a head node in the detection set. When a head node receives a ’1’, it checks if the Boolean algebra expression which defines a composite event E derives a TRUE value. If so, the head node immediately sends an event notification to the sink. The timeliness of event detection notification is improved by the guaranteed connectivity of the event detection set. A typical hardware–software joint implementation of event detection in WSNs is lucid dreaming (Jevtic, Kotowsky, Dick, Dindap, & Dowding, 2007), in which node power consumption is dramatically decreased by some specifically designed analog circuit. The target application for lucid dreaming is a structural autonomous crack monitoring (ACM) system from civil engineering that requires bursts of high resolution sampling in response to aperiodic vibrations in buildings and bridges. Figure 2 provides a high-level overview of lucid dreaming. Two sensors are installed on the WSN node. Primary sensor can provide high precision measurements with higher power consumption; while low power secondary sensor only provides low precision measurements that meet the requirement of event detection. Node is mostly placed in a low-power standby state. In the low power state, the microcontroller, the primary sensor and the ADC are placed in a power-down mode. Meanwhile, low power secondary sensor, and analog event detection circuit are in active working state. Event is detected by analog event<br />
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detection hardware when the secondary sensor output voltage exceeds a threshold. Analog event detection hardware then raises a hardware interrupt to wake up the microcontroller, the primary sensor, and the ADC to start collecting a series of high precision samples for further analysis.<br />
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SCHEMES FOR COMPLEX EVENT DETECTION Complex event can be regarded as a pattern. We refer any pattern that describes the feature of complex event as event pattern in this section. Considering the low computation capability and tight energy budget of a conventional WSN node, only selected lightweight pattern recognition techniques should be used to detect a complex event. According to the availability of priori knowledge of event pattern before any pattern recognition process, we will discuss two types of complex event detection in this section.<br />
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Event Detection Based on Known Event Patterns In this type of complex event detection, event pattern is known in advance. Generally, event pattern is predefined by field experts, who have made thorough analyses of history data in an offline fashion. It is also possible that event pattern is learned through some kind of training process. The following examples will illustrate two event detection techniques with predefined and trained event patterns respectively.<br />
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Figure 2. Lucid dreaming system overview<br />
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Event Detection with Predefined Event Pattern Contour Map Matching (Xue, Luo, Chen, & Liu, 2006), an event detection mechanism with predefined patterns is proposed based on matching the contour maps of in-network sensory data distribution. The events in sensor networks can be abstracted into spatio-temporal patterns of sensory data and that pattern matching can be done efficiently through contour map matching. A contour map of an attribute, for example, temperature, for a sensor network is a topographic map that displays the distribution of the attribute value over the network. In the map, the geometric space occupied by the network is partitioned into contiguous regions, each of which contains sensor nodes of a range of similar readings. These regions are called contour regions and the boundaries of the regions are called contour lines or contours, in short. A snapshot of a contour map, or a map snapshot, in short, is defined as the instance of the contour map at a specific point in time. Figure 3 shows a snapshot of the contour map for gas density attribute, which represents a continuous, gradual increasing or decreasing trend of attribute value in all directions, originated from a small center region. Users should give a specific time series of contour maps as the spatio-temporal pattern to represent an event. For example, a time series of contour maps, such as the one in Figure 3, may represent a gas leakage event. In each sample period of the query that monitors the event, this use-specified pattern is compared with the snapFigure 3. A snapshot of a contour map<br />
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shots of a contour map to determine whether the event has occurred. A similar approach for complex event detection with predefined event pattern is proposed in (M. Li, Liu, & Chen, 2008), which extends the application scenario to 3D environment. In stead of contour map, 3D gradient data map using the space orthogonal polyhedra (OP) model is utilized to describe the monitored 3D environment. A drawback of this kind of event detection method is that, if a user does not have a perfect knowledge about an event, the user may not be able to specify the value distribution of an attribute over space and the variation of this distribution over time incurred by the event.<br />
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Event Detection with In-Network Trained Event Pattern A representative event detection mechanism with in-network trained event pattern is proposed in (Wittenburg, Dziengel, & Schiller, 2008). The authors focused on WSN application scenario like fence monitoring. Based on the acceleration data gathered by several nodes, the WSN is able to differentiate between events such as a person climbing over the fence or a person merely shaking the fence. Event detection is realized on each node as a layered architecture. Four layers are defined from bottom to top are: raw data processing, feature extraction, feature distribution and fusion, and classification. Each individual layer has its specific task to perform. During raw data processing, the stream of raw data is preprocessed first to improve the data quality. The feature extraction uses the processed sensor data to calculate several descriptive features, for example, duration, minimum/maximum/average values or distribution of frequencies. The numeric values for each feature are then concatenated into a feature vector. During feature distribution and fusion, the feature vectors of all sensor nodes on which the event detection has been triggered, are sent to neighboring nodes<br />
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and concatenated into a combined feature vector. The classification compares the combined feature vector against a set of reference vectors with the Euclidean distance as metric. Each of the reference vectors corresponds to a previously trained class of events. If the event corresponding to the nearest reference vector is deemed worthy of reporting, a corresponding event is routed to the sink. The process of training the system to learn event pattern is similar. The lower three layers are used without modification. The final classification layer is replaced by a corresponding training component. For each event to be classified later on, a predetermined number of controlled events, like shaking the fence for three times, are used to calculate a specific reference feature vector.<br />
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Event Detection Based on Learned Normal Pattern<br />
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The linear segment that joins two neighboring sampling points in the time series X can be recognized as a linear pattern, which can be forYi = 〈x i , x i +1 〉 mally defined as (i = 1, 2,..., n − 1) . Let δi be the occurrence of<br />
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pattern Yi in time series X . If δi is below some<br />
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predefined value, Yi is termed an infrequent pattern; Otherwise, it is called a frequent pattern. It is meaningful to count the frequency of each type of pattern in the context of WSN applications like event detection. Frequently appeared patterns always arise from system errors such as temperature fluctuation of atmosphere. This type of patterns is expected and is seldom regarded as being interesting. Only infrequently appeared patterns have the potential of being novel, exceptional, or interesting events. The method includes two main phases:<br />
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Sometimes we could not know in advance, the event pattern we are looking for. Obtaining the event pattern is just impossible or the cost is prohibitively high. On the contrary, other normal patterns that frequently appear can be easily learned in some way. Strategy for this kind of complex event detection involves finding all normal patterns first and then treating any other mismatches as event patterns. We will introduce two event detection techniques of this cohort.<br />
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• <br />
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Event Detection with Linear Normal Pattern<br />
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The key advantage of this technique is its ultra low computation complexity. Thus, it can be used in an online fashion even in the low cost WSN nodes. But many other types of complex event take on nonlinear change pattern, thus some advanced techniques should be used to find patterns out.<br />
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Unspecific event detection is discussed in (Zhang, Wang, Li, Zhou, & Gao, 2009), in which a linear pattern is used to identify the normal environment changes. The measurement time series can be expressed as X = 〈x 1, x 2 ,..., x n 〉 , where element x i denotes<br />
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the measurement value at time ti for the time series X . The sampling interval ∆t = tt − ti −1 (i = 2, 3,..., n ) is a constant, which is an application-dependent value.<br />
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Learning phase, where an algorithm is realized to learn the frequently happened patterns from the measurement series in an online fashion. Detection phase, where new linear pattern is constructed using incoming sensor measurement data and then decision is made on whether the new pattern is a frequent or infrequent pattern. Infrequent pattern should be reported as an event.<br />
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Event Detection with Nonlinear Normal Pattern In (Zoumboulakis & Roussos, 2007), Symbolic Aggregate Approximation (SAX) algorithm (Lin, Keogh, Lonardi, & Chiu, 2003) is used to convert<br />
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streaming sensor data to string representation. In this way, linear or nonlinear complex event pattern, which emerges in a set of sensor data, can be represented by a string. By transforming real valued sensor data series into symbolic representations, the wealth of data structures and algorithms from the text processing and bioinformatics fields can be utilized to find complex event patterns efficiently. In summary, there are two main phases for this approach. Nodes go through a learning phase that is known to be normal. During this phase, temporally adjacent sets of readings are converted to strings by SAX algorithm. Nodes continuously compare strings and compute distances among them. Once the learning phase is complete, these distances are used for non-parametric detection — the distances effectively constitute the normal context. In the detection phase, SAX is called to convert temporally adjacent two sets of readings into strings, and calculate the distance of the two strings. A distance never seen before represents some kind of potential event.<br />
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tant to understand that these schemes work well respectively in possibly quite different WSN application scenarios or problem domains. Given the diversity of the application scenarios, user requirements and technique realizations, it is not feasible to provide a complete comparison of these event detection schemes. Instead, we would like to analyze the relative strengths and weaknesses of these schemes. Threshold based event detection schemes are well suited for detecting simple event and composite event. These schemes can be easily integrated into some middleware realizations. Thus the overall cost of the realization is generally low. One of the main disadvantages for threshold based event detection is the maintenance of suitable thresholds. Unsuitable threshold will either trigger too much false alarms or miss some important events. Pattern based event detection schemes are designed to detect complex event. Each scheme in this category has its specific strengths and weaknesses. Table 1 provides a basic comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of different schemes.<br />
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COMPARISON OF EVENT DETECTION SCHEMES<br />
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FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS<br />
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Each of the large number of event detection schemes, which was mentioned in previous sections or discussed in other literature, has its unique strengths and weaknesses. It is impor-<br />
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Although many event detection techniques exist in WSNs, considering the diversity and complexity of real application requirements in WSNs, there is still a broad space for further research efforts.<br />
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Table 1. A comparison of different complex event detection schemes Scheme Types<br />
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Strengths/Features<br />
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Weaknesses /Limitations<br />
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References<br />
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Predefined event pattern<br />
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No training process. Good for very complex spatiotemporal event pattern.<br />
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Event pattern should be specified in advance, usually by an offline analysis. Not easy to change event pattern after deployment.<br />
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(Xue, et al., 2006) (M. Li, et al., 2008)<br />
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In-network trained event pattern<br />
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Event pattern is learned by training process.<br />
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Event pattern should be repeated in a controlled way during the training process.<br />
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(Wittenburg, et al., 2008)<br />
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Online learned normal pattern<br />
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Training process is online and optional. Low computation complexity even for a battery powered sensor node.<br />
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Only good to find infrequently appeared temporal event patterns in sensor data stream. Fixed sample internal for sensor data stream.<br />
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(Zhang, et al., 2009) (Zoumboulakis & Roussos, 2007)<br />
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First, event detection with heterogeneous sensor network nodes is gaining popularity in many practical applications (Cui, Li, & Zhao, 2008). The meaning of heterogeneous is twofold: senor node with different sensor modules and sensor node with different resource limitations. Distributed event detection mechanism should have a better ability for collaboration to dispatch work duties evenly to nodes according to each node’s complex capability. Second, threshold based and pattern based event detection techniques have their respective strengths and weaknesses. Existing middleware realizations are mainly concerned with atom and composite event detection, and each pattern based event detection technique is generally realized separately in specific application module. How to integrate them in a uniform framework will need more research. Third, multiple events detection is appealing in some applications (Banerjee, Xie, & Agrawal, 2008). The most existing event detection techniques lack the ability to detect multiple events that are happened simultaneously. When sensor node samples mixed data from multiple events, more collaboration among neighbor nodes is need to distinguish one event from another. Fourth, security of event detection deserves some attention, especially for military applications in hostile environment and critical infrastructure monitoring. The authenticity, privacy and integrity of event messaging will certainly need more consideration.<br />
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CONCLUSION As WSN matures, an increasing number of WSNs is deployed over the world to monitor the physical world. Providing event service is a core function for almost every WSN. Event service is a broad topic that includes event description, event detection, event delivery, etc. In this chapter, we have discussed the problem of event detection in<br />
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WSNs. Event definition, classification, key issues and challenges for realizing event detection mechanism in WSNs, are introduced sequentially as background introduction. Then we discuss different ways to detecting event in WSNs, and have attempted to provide an overview of the literature on various technical schemes. We broadly classify event detection mechanism into threshold based and pattern based detection. For each category of event detection mechanism, we have surveyed some representative techniques and their realization schemes. Since event detection technology is continuously ending, we suggest several promising future research directions.<br />
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REFERENCES Banerjee, T., Xie, B., & Agrawal, D. P. (2008). Fault tolerant multiple event detection in a wireless sensor network. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, 68(9), 1222–1234. doi:10.1016/j. jpdc.2008.04.009 Bonnet, P., Gehrke, J., & Seshadri, P. (2000). Querying the physical world. IEEE Personal Communications, 7(5), 10–15. doi:10.1109/98.878531 Chandola, V., Banerjee, A., & Kumar, V. (2009). Anomaly detection: A survey. ACM Computer Survey, 41(3), Article 15, 58 pages. Cui, X., Li, Q., & Zhao, B. (2008). Efficient fume diffusion spotting in heterogeneous sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM International Workshop on Heterogeneous Sensor and Actor Networks (pp. 31-35). ACM Press. Hellerstein, J., Hong, W., Madden, S., & Stanek, K. (2003). Beyond Average: Toward Sophisticated Sensing with Queries. In Zhao, F., & Guibas, L. (Eds.), Information Processing in Sensor Networks (pp. 553–553). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.<br />
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Intanagonwiwat, C., Govindan, R., Estrin, D., Heidemann, J., & Silva, F. (2003). Directed diffusion for wireless sensor networking. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 11(1), 2–16. doi:10.1109/TNET.2002.808417 Jevtic, S., Kotowsky, M., Dick, R. P., Dindap, P. A., & Dowding, C. (2007). Lucid Dreaming: Reliable Analog Event Detection for Energy-Constrained Applications. In Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks(IPSN 2007) (pp. 350-359). Kumar, A. V. U. P., Adi Mallikarjuna Reddy, V., & Janakiram, D. (2005). Distributed collaboration for event detection in wireless sensor networks. Paper presented at the 3rd International Workshop on Middleware for Pervasive and Ad-hoc Computing, Grenoble, France. Lai, S., Cao, J., & Zheng, Y. (2009). PSWare: A publish / subscribe middleware supporting composite event in wireless sensor network. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications(PerCom 2009) (pp. 1-6). Lewis, F. L. (2004). Wireless Sensor Networks. In Cook, D. J., & Dos, S. K. (Eds.), Smart Environments: Technologies, Protocols and Applications. New York: John Wiley. Li, M., Liu, Y., & Chen, L. (2008). Non-Threshold based Event Detection for 3D Environment Monitoring in Sensor Networks. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 20(12), 1699–1711. doi:10.1109/TKDE.2008.114 Li, S., Lin, Y., Son, S. H., Stankovic, J. A., & Wei, Y. (2004). Event Detection Services Using Data Service Middleware in Distributed Sensor Networks. Telecommunication Systems, 26(2-4), 351–368. doi:10.1023/B:TELS.0000029046.79337.8f Lin, J., Keogh, E., Lonardi, S., & Chiu, B. (2003). A symbolic representation of time series, with implications for streaming algorithms. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGMOD Workshop on Research Issues in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (pp. 2-11). ACM Press. 248<br />
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Nakamura, E. F., Loureiro, A. A. F., & Frery, A. C. (2007). Information fusion for wireless sensor networks: Methods, models, and classifications. ACM Computer Survey, 39(3), Article 9, 55 pages. Ni, K., Nithya, R., Mohamed Nabil Hajj, C., Laura, B., Sheela, N., & Sadaf, Z. (2009). Sensor network data fault types. [TOSN]. ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, 5(3), 1–29. doi:10.1145/1525856.1525863 Rozsnyai, S., Schiefer, J., & Schatten, A. (2007). Concepts and models for typing events for eventbased systems. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Distributed Event-Based Systems (pp. 62-70). ACM Press. Verdone, R., Dardari, D., Mazzini, G., & Conti, A. (2008). Wireless sensor and actuator networks: technologies, analysis and design. Amsterdam: Elsevier/Academic Press. Vu, C. T., Beyah, R. A., & Li, Y. (2007). Composite Event Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks. In Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Performance, Computing, and Communications Conference (pp. 264-271). Vuran, M. C., Akan, O. B., & Akyildiz, I. F. (2004). Spatio-temporal correlation: theory and applications for wireless sensor networks. Computer Networks, 45(3), 245–259. doi:10.1016/j. comnet.2004.03.007 Wittenburg, G., Dziengel, N., & Schiller, J. (2008). In-network training and distributed event detection in wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (pp. 387-388). ACM Press. Xue, W., Luo, Q., Chen, L., & Liu, Y. (2006). Contour map matching for event detection in sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 2006 ACM International Conference on Management of Data(SIGMOD 2006) (pp. 145-156). ACM Press.<br />
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Yick, J., Mukherjee, B., & Ghosal, D. (2008). Wireless sensor network survey. Computer Networks, 52(12), 2292–2330. doi:10.1016/j. comnet.2008.04.002 Zhang, C., Wang, C., Li, D., Zhou, X., & Gao, C. (2009). Unspecific event detection in wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Communication Software and Networks(ICCSN 2009) (pp. 243-246). Zoumboulakis, M., & Roussos, G. (2007). Escalation: Complex Event Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks. In Kortuem, G., Finney, J., Lea, R., & Sundramoorthy, V. (Eds.), Smart Sensing and Context (pp. 270–285). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-75696-5_17<br />
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Event: An event can be defined as an exceptional change in the environmental parameters such as temperature, pressure, humidity, etc. Atomic Event: Any event that can be represented by a single attribute-threshold pair like ‘temperature > 100°C’ is a atomic event.<br />
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Composite Event: The event that is a combination of several atomic events is a composite event. Complex Event: A complex event can be a gradual and continuous change over time and space, or take on some complex patterns. Thus, it has no clear threshold border with normal environment parameters. Middleware: Middleware is usually below the application layer and on top of the operating systems and the network layer. It coordinates requirements from multiple applications, hides details of lower levels, provides common services, and facilitates application development, deployment, and management. Sink: Sink is a specific kind of node where the data should be delivered to. One or multiple sinks can exist in wireless sensor networks depending on application requirements. In some deployments, sinks have more resources and capabilities than other sensor nodes. Wireless Sensor Network (WSN): The wireless network consisting of small sensor nodes that cooperatively monitor environmental conditions, such as temperature, humidity, motion, and so forth.<br />
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M-English Podcast:<br />
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A Tool for Mobile Devices Célia Menezes Escola Sec. Inf. D. Henrique, Portugal Fernando Moreira Universidade Portucalense, Portugal<br />
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ABSTRACT At the beginning of the 21st century in a world dominated by technology it is essential to enhance and update the school, creating conditions for the students to succeed, consolidating the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as a key resource for learning and teaching in this new era. In this chapter we will describe a study that was carried out in a Portuguese school. As a means to overcome some of the existing logistical obstacles in the school, where the possibility of carrying out ICT activities without restrictions was still dreamlike, the podcast was implemented as an m-learning tool. Being aware of the fact that nowadays mobile phones and mp3 players are part of our students’ lives, we took advantage of this fact and the podcast was used as a tool to support, to enhance and to motivate students to learn English, used thus as a complement to traditional (face-to-face) learning.<br />
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INTRODUCTION The recent technological revolution established a new order in various fields of human action and Education is one of the most privileged areas. In recent years we have been witnessing huge changes in the students’ behavior and attitudes. Prensky (2001) calls them “digital natives”. They were born and grew up surrounded by mobile phones, computers, Internet, digital television, DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch016<br />
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MP3/4 players, among many other digital and mobile devices. These devices are an integral part of their routines. As a consequence of this phenomenon, the way they process information and interact with it is clearly different from their parents’ generation. The educational system was not designed for “digital natives” (Prensky, 2001) and it is now taking its first steps towards Knowledge Society. Today’s school must learn to communicate in the language of this new generation and the teachers must be the facilitators of this new language,<br />
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Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.<br />
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abandoning comfortable and traditional learning methodologies and approaches. In order to meet up this demand, there is the Portuguese Technological Plan for Education, which main objective is to leverage the skills and qualifications of the Portuguese towards the Knowledge Society. The materialization of this objective involves equipping schools with computer and connectivity equipment and to give teachers the necessary skills in ICT. However, the spread of technological resources will not suffice if there are no tools, materials and appropriate content (Resolução do Conselho de Ministros nº 137/2007, p. 6572). Web 2.0 offers a huge amount and variety of tools and applications that allow us to meet up the addressed objectives in the ministerial resolution. It is urgent to consider the school, particularly considering that we have within it a generation of students influenced by all these technological devices, the Internet, and social networks. Menezes (2008) relates an experiment with the inclusion of a blog in the context of the English class just as a way to create content and materials in a program unit. According to this author, the experience proved to be fruitful for the improvement of levels of motivation and interest of students in activities. This fact was a strategic element in the recovery of students with very little success in English and also in developing expertise in ICT. Menezes & Moreira (2009) reported the beginning of this study indicating good forecast in what concerns the attitude and the initial results of students in school year 2008/2009. It also confirmed the potential of the podcast as a new paradigm of learning, and as a trigger to develop activities that foster the development of oral and writing skills in the English language. In this context the purpose of this chapter to analyze the impact of podcast used as a tool for mobile devices in English class. The podcast was used as a learning support tool to complement and to facilitate English learning with 97 7th grade students.<br />
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We will evaluate the impact on the acquisition of specific and cross skills, emphasizing the potential of this tool used in an m-learning approach, realizing how this new paradigm can be an advantage for students in the acquisition and improvement of skills.<br />
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BACKGROUND Language Learning: From the Traditional Approach to Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) Since early days speaking a foreign language has been considered a way to cross bridges to other banks. In fact, this has always stood as a mobile tool for learning, doing business, politics, tourism, making friendship. In this sense Warschauer (2000) names English as “lingua franca” and places the emphasis on the ability to communicate interacting functionally, rather than “achieving nativelike perfection”. In the last decades, the Globalization of the economy and the inclusion of ICT in all fronts of human daily life have also brought a deep impact in what concerns English teaching. As Warschauer (2000) also states it is related “to trends in employment”, due to the fact that jobs that used to exist in the industrial era are disappearing and are being replaced by new types of jobs and works which require new skills. For these reasons several approaches have been used when teaching / learning a foreign language. The adoption of different methodologies and approaches and the introduction of ICT have contributed to the fact that a great part of the world population speaks more than one language thus having a multipurpose mobile tool. From the Traditional Approach, which lasted until the middle of the 20th century to the Direct Method in the late 19th and early 20th century, or the Systematic Approach of the early twentieth century to the Audio-lingual Method or the Com-<br />
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municative Approach, the evolution of approaches and methodologies in foreign language teaching does not necessarily imply total rejection of the preceding approaches or methods. The changes are gradual and happen in different ways. This development was always accompanied with different technologies. With the spread of computers and the Internet, the integration of the teaching practices by teachers and students has proved to be extremely important as a means of facilitating the teaching-learning of foreign languages. The use of computer in this context is known internationally as CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning).<br />
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CALL Language teaching-learning mediated by computer, CALL, is an area whose history reveals changes both related with the development of theories about language and teaching of foreign languages and the advent of ICT, which amplify the increasing variety of functions by computers (Souza, 2004, p. 74). ↜CALL is a way to promote computer-based learning. It is not a method. CALL materials are tools that trigger learning situations. The emphasis is given to student learning and not to the teacher’s activity in itself. The materials are used to facilitate the learning process. According to Warschauer and Healey (1998, pp. 57-71), the evolution of the use of comput-<br />
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ers in language teaching is the result of two intertwined factors: the different approaches in language teaching and the technical development and accessibility to computers. Warschauer (2000, pp. 61-67) has divided CALL into three distinct stages: behaviorist or structural CALL, communicative CALL and integrative CALL. Warschauer (2004) shows us a glance of the evolution of the presence of computers in learning the English language (Table 1). This division into three phases (Table 1) suggested by Warschauer, shows the evolution of the presence of computer in learning English. However, as the author argues, these phases are not watertight and the resources of each are combined. Today in many schools these resources are being used by teachers and students with different objectives. This division also intends to show that the potential of computers in language learning implies not only to consider the possibilities of the computer in technical terms, but ultimately, its relationship with the methodological approach adopted and the wider prevailing social and economical canvas where the computer is placed (Buzato, 2001). Regardless of the findings of studies that exist, it should be noted that technology should be seen as a resource, not a method, and that technology itself does not promote learning (Attwell, 2008). In situations of learning the same technology can be used for different purposes according to differ-<br />
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Table 1. Warschauer’s Three Stages of CALL Stage<br />
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1970s-1980s: Structural CALL<br />
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1980s-1990s: Communicative CALL<br />
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21st Century: Integrative CALL<br />
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Technology<br />
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Mainframe<br />
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PCs<br />
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Multimedia and Internet<br />
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English-Teaching Paradigm<br />
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Grammar-Translation & AudioLingual<br />
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Communicate Language Teaching<br />
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Content-Based, English for Special Purposes (ESP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP)<br />
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View of Language<br />
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Structural (a formal structural system)<br />
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Cognitive (a mentally-constructed system)<br />
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Socio-cognitive (developed in social interaction)<br />
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Principal Use of Computers<br />
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Drill and Practice<br />
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Communicative Exercises<br />
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Authentic Discourse<br />
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Principal Objective<br />
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Accuracy<br />
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Fluency<br />
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Agency<br />
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ent views of language and different paradigms of learning and this can lead to very different results. Some educational researches have shown that the presence of computers in schools does not lead to real changes, since the tendency is to be used in accordance with existing practices (OECD, 2001) and may even be counter-productive and a source of lack of interest (Warschauer & Meskill, 2000). Like other technology, the computer is also a possible resource and the results will always depend on the interaction with it. Despite its enormous potential, the computer and Internet resources should be viewed as a complement and as a way to support learning and not as a panacea for teaching-learning.<br />
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Web 2.0: New Tools, New Students and Learning The Internet has broken with the traditional notion of time and space. We live in a society where knowledge and its share is processed at high speed through social communities generated in Web 2.0. The level of knowledge and its application is an advantage for the full integration of students in the future society as active participants in the construction of modern society. This development has fostered and developed new important skills in long life learning. In this sense, knowledge is seen as something finite, a process in permanent construction. In this constructivist perspective, the teacher has a new role – he is the facilitator of the acquisition knowledge process - promoting learning environments that foster a flexible and interactive relationship with the environment by offering students a multidisciplinary approach to enable them to deal with the realities of the global world. The teacher is no longer the holder of knowledge! ↜Building knowledge is to build your own meaning and not find the right answers to specific question. The construction of meaning involves understanding the whole and its constituent parts, but should not focus on isolated facts – it’s the meaningful learning (Ausubel, 2003). According<br />
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to Ausubel (2003), the new knowledge we acquire is related to the prior knowledge that we have, that is, the information relates in a relevant way with a certain important aspect of the student’s previous knowledge. A significant learning happens when new information is anchored in pre-existing relevant concepts in the cognitive structure of the student, by leveraging the multiple intelligences. Also for Gardner (1993) all individuals have the ability to question and seek answers using the multiple intelligences, since the author assumes that all individuals have basic skills in all their intelligences. Schools should prepare their students for life. Schools should provide environments that foster knowledge construction. Schools should encourage students to use that knowledge to solve problems and accomplish tasks that are related to the life of their community and foster the development of other skills needed in other future contexts. Are today’s teachers working on this? Teachers cannot stand aside from the fact that the students were born in a digital world where they spend much time playing in front of a computer screen or talking on MSN messenger, not to mention the time spent on the phone sending messages. How can we engage students in the learning process effectively? Taking advantage of these students’ beloved devices can be a good bet. We must not forget that, as Andreoli (2007, p. 23) writes, the mobile phone has reached such a ubiquity, that new generations look upon it as a product of nature, like milk or tomatoes. Putting mobile technology at the service of education to engage students in various learning, fostering the pleasure for it and in the development of skills should be a strategy not to be forgotten.<br />
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The Children of Technology Students send thousands of messages and emails and spend much time chatting on Messenger. They are accused of not reading enough, but nevertheless, thousands of messages seem to be a lot of<br />
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text read and written and much of its orality occurs in this environment – it is a new literacy, the digital literacy. We are offered various tools such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, webquests, e-portfolios, etc. Mobile phones and mp3/mp4 players are part of the technology that goes in the pocket of our youngsters. These devices can become much more than a communication phenomena. Since the students know how to use these technologies so well, why not using it for the improvement and enrichment of teaching-learning of the different subjects? As stated by Moreira & Paes (2007), if the devices are used as instructional tools to build learning, they can be treated as tools to help students perform their tasks and promote their development, working as partners for the teacher and the student. This way, the students probably will like the subjects more and be motivated to study and so will get engaged more actively in the tasks and will derive pleasure in acquiring new knowledge. Also for Prensky, technology in today’s society is a basic condition for the development of individuals in several areas. He also argues that the computer, the mobile phone and the Internet contribute greatly to the cognitive development of digital natives, a term used to refer to the entire generation that is growing in the web environment and within all the technology in general. This should not be neglected by both school and families (Prensky, 2006). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, Del.icio.us, Google (Gmail, …), YouTube are tools and services that emerged from the second generation of the Web and have become extremely popular in the digital world. What they have in common is that they offer collaborative learning environment through learning communities forming a collective intelligence. Web 2.0, or rather, the tools and services it offers, has the potential to support different forms of social interaction, communication and collaboration in knowledge construction which involves all members of the learning community.<br />
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Podcast In this context, the podcast emerges as a tool with great potential to be exploited by combining a few simple items such as a mobile device or computer and a podcast certainly we will be facing a new paradigm philosophy of learning anytime, anywhere. But what is a podcast? A podcast is a digitally created audio recording that is shared with others. The most common way to share a podcast is to post it online, then place a link to that file on a Website, wiki or blog. Distribution is the key element of podcasting. Because podcasts are recorded digitally, they can be edited, merged, duplicated, distributed, and shared with a few mouse clicks. Often there is little or no cost associated with distribution (…) in an educational environment, a variety of distribution and listening scenarios are useful. (Fontichiaro, 2008, pp. 7, 8) A podcast is made of episodes. Whenever a new episode is available, the student is automatically notified and so the student visits the podcast and downloads the new episode. ↜Despite the professional and sophisticated layout of a podcast, its production does not require vast technical knowledge. In fact, all it takes is just a computer with Internet connection, a microphone and the software for the digitization of sound (if the option only for sound). In digitization of sound, one of the most popular open-source software used is Audacity.↜There are thousands of audio and video podcasts being subscribed. According to a report published in July 2006, about nine million people had done or had heard weekly podcasts (King & Gura, 2007, p. 19). There are already podcasts for all subjects for different levels of education (Williams, 2007). It is indeed something you should think, according to Williams (2007) to use the podcast as a complement to learning by extending the physical room of the classroom. However, to create our own is very fruitful and<br />
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to get the students to produce their own is even better thus developing their skills both the digital and the specific skills. The podcast has educational potential in teaching-learning, because of its versatility and portability, since it is a word recorded product, which means a great advantage in studying the diverse subjects that are part of the curriculum (King & Gura, 2007, p. 147) and it can be “carried” anywhere. ↜Like so many other things associated with the act of reading / writing on the web, the podcast was born from the wish to make life online easier. This tool is a simple way to distribute free content, which can be downloaded on mobile devices such as mobile phones and mp3/mp4 players, which are the most common among students. ↜After a careful planning for integration of this tool, it can be used to curriculum development, to promote research activities, to share school news, to field recording, professional development, to support study,, for projects such as an interview with someone and also to archive the material given in class (Williams, 2007, pp. 30, 31). The podcast is going at high speed in the 21st century education. There is a great deal to discover and do. Just open your mind to innovation and let your imagination fly away.<br />
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Podcasting in English Class The use of the podcast in an educational context brings many advantages for the teaching-learning process. In the case of learning a foreign language it is very enriching in developing vocabulary during the research for the various projects, developing their orality, enhancing fluency and linguistic agility due to repetition, which obviously have to be made during the recording of each episode. The use of podcast in foreign language learning is a tool with great potential, both pedagogical and motivational as well (Moura & Carvalho, nd). The novelty factor arouses greater interest in learning content by students. With this resource, we can respect different rates of learning, as students can listen as many times as necessary, to understand<br />
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the content. If the teacher is a good facilitator in using this tool, students are encouraged to record episodes, thus learning a lot more. They will have greater concern in preparing a good text and to provide a correct and logical text to their classmates. Finally, speaking and listening activities are much more significant learning activities than the isolated act of reading. Likewise, since the tasks done to create podcast are usually performed in a group, they represent excellent opportunities to promote collaborative learning (Moura & Carvalho, nd).<br />
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THE STUDY This study was held in São Martinho do Campo School, which is situated in the parish of São Martinho do Campo, Santo Tirso, Oporto, Portugal. The local economy is based on the textile and clothing industry. However, a small percentage of the population is still engaged in agriculture. The difficulties that the textile industry in the region has been going through with the global economy and competition from low-cost countries have led to high unemployment rates in the sector. This school lives within this economic context, very similar to other traditional Portuguese schools. The term “traditional school” is hereby understood as a school where there were difficulties and obstacles in carrying out with ICT. Some of such obstacles are, for instance, the fact that the two computer labs are often unavailable, the wireless network only covers a small area of the school or the vast majority of students still do not have Internet connection at home. In terms of hardware computers were close to being obsolete and the available laptops also provided low performances, which makes a simple search task frustrating. Despite the constraints mentioned above, it is essential to find methods and strategies that aim to enhance the school, giving it the role of socialization and a means of facilitating learning<br />
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that provide cross and specific skills essential for the integration of students in the 21st century. This study reflects on the specific theme of ICT, more specifically the use of podcast with mobile devices as a complement to face-to-face learning, in the development and acquisition of cross and specific skills, with 97 7th grade students in the English class.<br />
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Methodology For the research of new educational paradigms, such as ICT in Education, the qualitative approaches can offer important contributions complemented with quantitative methodologies. According to Coutinho & Chaves (2002), they have are a great potential for investigation in many research situations in educational technology. In this sense, the main question we addressed in this study was: Learning with mobile devices using the podcast truly improves learning, students’ performance and involvement in the English language? In the first part of this study a quantitative approach was done – an inquiry. The construction of this survey was based on closed and mixed questions using Likert’s scale with growing order. The inquiry was divided into two parts each referring to two specific objectives: to know the satisfaction rate and attitude toward English and the students’ skills in ICT. With this data we wanted to identify the profile of each class in terms of: • • • • • • • <br />
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Rate of satisfaction and motivation for English; Difficulties felt be the students in this subject; Study habits; Interest in ICT; Skills in ICT; Possession of computer and Internet access; Possession of mobile devices.<br />
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In the second part, we used the podcast as a tool to complement English learning. With this tool the students have also produced their episodes, both in the classroom and outside the class room. With this procedure we worked out specific English language skills, as well as ICT skills. In the third part we applied a new inquiry, using the same type of questions, which sought to evaluate the impact that the use of the podcast had at different levels: • • • • • <br />
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The attitude of students; Assessment – students’ results; Rate of satisfaction and motivation for the discipline; The development of the students’ ICT skills; The pedagogical value of the podcast.<br />
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The Podcast “English is Fun” To achieve the goals of this study we created the podcast “English is Fun” and it can be accessed in http://englishisfun.podomatic.com/. On the profile of the podcaster we can read the message where she states the main objectives for the use of this tool. The teacher sought to implement a new approach in English classes during the school year 2008/2009. For the production of the several episodes, we used audio mp3 files which were produced with Audacity, and they were hosted on PodOmatic. In addition to the episodes made only by the teacher, the students also took part in some of these activities. To teach the students to make their own episodes independently, we spent some classes of Support Study to teach them to work with this tool. During these classes the interest, enthusiasm and involvement of students was enormous, in part due to the novelty factor. In fact, the students were having contact with ICT in a different perspective and were getting to know something that they had never heard about until then. Surprisingly, they<br />
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found that their mobile phones and mp3 players were also ICT! Although the students have never had any podcaster’s privileges, they were also shown how a podcast worked, how the episodes were published. During classes, students were allowed to download or copy files directly to their mobile devices because some of them still did not have Internet connection or computer at home.<br />
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Types of Episodes The typology of the episodes depends on the objectives of the teaching content and the activities given. As an example, as part of unit 1 content entitled “People and Places” of the adopted student’s book, the teacher published the first episode. This episode had several objectives. First, the students had to listen to it carefully and then had to write a similar text about him /herself or about a classmate. They also made interviews with their classmates. After the stage of writing and correction of the texts, they were able to record their first texts. With this activity the students were led to work on their specific English skills - listening, reading, speaking and understanding oral and written texts, interacting with their peers and teacher. These tasks corresponded to the specific needs of communication. The students showed great commitment and enthusiasm for the activities associated with the production of an episode. During the activities, they asked questions in order to resolve doubts and to learn more. During the activities the podcast has showed to be of special importance to a student who suffers from deafness. What he hears is thanks to the use of an amplifier device. Obviously, the difficulties that this student has to hear are reflected directly in his orality. The exercises involved in the construction of an episode led him to memorize and repeat sounds and words. These exercises have contributed much to improving his performance, and increased his motivation and interest.<br />
<br />
In order to support the students to study grammar issues, the teacher published grammar episodes. Here we chose to do this type of episodes in Portuguese with examples in English because the language skills of the students were still not good enough. Another experiment that was done was an evaluation worksheet based on an episode. Students had to download the episode to their mobile devices, had to listen to the text as many times as they needed to take control of the details of the text. Later, they did the evaluation worksheet with listening comprehension exercises. The results of this experience can be considered satisfactory since it was the first task done in such way. About 35% of students scored Excellent 18% Good, 23% Satisfactory and 24% Unsatisfactory. The unsatisfactory results are due primarily to the fact that students had neglected the listening of the text because, as later they told the teacher, they thought they would have the text in written format. Others simply not believed that the teacher would perform such an evaluation worksheet. The group of English teachers decided to work extensive reading in English classes. The chosen book was “Fruit Tree Island” by Sue Arengo. We anticipated some difficulties. The approach on extensive reading in the 7th grade depends on the options of the teachers. Also, the purchase of the book by the students is at an extra cost of school supplies to students’ families. Besides when students are confronted with the fact of reading a book, this represents something boring, another “thing” to do. Anticipating these difficulties and as a means of avoiding them, we used the podcast as a way to work and to reach all students with no costs and in an innovative way. “Fruit Tree Island” was recorded in three episodes to avoid creating a single large file. Some of the mobile devices of students do not have large storage capacity - a single file of the book would be 10Mb which would make it impossible to use. Junior & Coutinho (2007) also advise the use of short duration episodes of and even advise 30<br />
<br />
257<br />
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M-English Podcast<br />
<br />
seconds. These authors argue that the short length encourages concentration and they say listening to long texts does not produce good results. ↜Probably due to the novelty factor, the students showed real enthusiasm for the book. Using the podcast triggered the interest in it. We were able to observe the different rates of reading and understanding the text, since the students always have different characteristics in these areas. After this phase, were able to perform the various activities of reading comprehension during the subsequent lessons. One of the aspects we would like to highlight is that the podcast allows shy and introverted students to participate unconditionally in the activities, thus allowing their social integration and promoting solidarity among all the students (Jesus & Moreira, 2009). They do not produce the episodes in class but at home and then send the files via e-mail. The episode “Ana Lucia’s Daily Routine” is an example. Due to the interest and engagement in activities, there was a group of students who recorded a few episodes out of the classroom as extra work. The recorded texts were chosen by them individually and in pairs, for instance, the episode “Paula interviews Kelis”, or “Big Ben” made by Rui. The podcast “English is Fun” proved to be excellent because it allowed students to practise their orality due to listening to the right accent. It was also relevant as a support studying tool, since the students could listen to their teacher at home explaining grammatical content for example. However, one of the most important aspects that should be noted was the fact that the podcast led students to writing activities, which is so important in this context as stated by Ramos (2005), the only way to improve skills and exercising it. In this case, to improve the writing what one has to do is write and rewrite, learn by doing, as recommended by constructivist theories. Diversified writing activities in many different areas of the curriculum gives students the opportunity to practice and thus to improve. The potential of group work was promoted to the extent that, for<br />
<br />
258<br />
<br />
the production of an episode, the students always liked to participate in some way, even if it was by a simple button click. This created environment, comfortable and relaxed, both in human and in technical terms, also helped to stimulate and develop students ‘confidence, more particularly, students with difficulties in communicating, both in the case of students with deafness, as in students have great difficulty in communication because they are shy and introverted, creating them a comfortable way to express themselves orally and in the written format. This was an important step towards the improvement of communicative skill.<br />
<br />
The Podcast “K12 English Poetry” As part of the National Plan for Reading our school organized the activity “The Week of Poetry”. This week, there was a day dedicated to poetry and rhymes in English. As a way to engage the classes and to participate in an innovative way, we created the podcast “K12 English Poetry” and it can be accessed in http://k12-englishpoetry.podomatic. com/. The poems and rhymes were chosen by the students with the teacher’s help. On “Day of English Poetry”, these episodes were broadcast on the school radio “Open Wave” during school breaks. The activities that preceded the recording of the episodes were important for the same reasons already mentioned for the podcast “English is Fun”. The activities once more proved to be a strategic element in the contribution of that group of students with difficulties both physical and cognitive, not to mention the shy ones. Some of these “characteristics” are “visible” in some episodes. Two of these students have serious difficulties in the cognitive level which leads to an ineffective orality. During these activities the students showed great interest and commitment and there was room for true moments of fun and relaxation. The students even took the teacher to become involved in an episode, which created a good moment of complicity, which shows us that the activities<br />
<br />
M-English Podcast<br />
<br />
related to the production of the podcast are also good triggers to develop a good relationship with the students. ↜On the day of activity, the reaction of students was interesting. Since it was their first time on radio, they walked through the corridors very proud of their work. The students, who were passing by, not involved in the activity, showed curiosity and asked questions about what they were listening to and so it was the opportunity to learn what a podcast is.<br />
<br />
THE RESULTS OF THE INQUIRIES English Became Friendlier The analysis of the results obtained from the first inquiry, in what concerns the students’ rate of satisfaction and attitude toward English, when they were asked if they liked English, we found that most students did not particularly like the English (Table 2), about 44% and about 25% of the students said they do not like with a percentage of 19% or hate 6%. On the other hand only 24% of students admitted to like English and about 6% said to love it. These results proved to be very close to how students evaluated themselves initially, where 18% evaluated themselves negatively, 46% satisfactory, 26% believe to have good skills and only 8% considered to be very good in English, though we cannot forget that this feeling may be<br />
<br />
related to the assessment obtained in the previous school year. Before these results, we were able to anticipate some demotivation and indifference to the subject. These results were expected. This attitude towards English was an already identified problem by the school. The Educational Project (2007) of the school, defined some guiding strategies to fight this trend, whose main objective is the development of communication skills in foreign languages, using appropriate strategies for effective possession of communication skills with particular relevance to the learning of English (Educational Project, 2007). The results are clearly different after using the podcast. When we compared the initial results of the question if they liked English with the second inquiry we observed trend had changed (Table 2). The number of students who claimed not to be particularly fond of English decreased to 35%. The change in the results is more evident in the percentage of students who had admitted to dislike or hate English -19%. It appears that only 6% of this population still does not like English. The number of students who liked English or who loved the subject increased significantly, 38% and 20%, respectively, comparing to initial data. At the beginning of the school year, we wanted to detect the major difficulties students had in English (Figure 1). It was found that the difficulties were several, with only a small group of students,<br />
<br />
Table 2. Students’ attitude towards English €€€€€Likert’s scale<br />
<br />
€€€€€1<br />
<br />
€€€€€2<br />
<br />
€€€€€3<br />
<br />
€€€€€4<br />
<br />
€€€€€1st inquiry<br />
<br />
€€€€€6<br />
<br />
€€€€€19<br />
<br />
€€€€€43<br />
<br />
€€€€€23<br />
<br />
€€€€€6<br />
<br />
€€€€€2nd inquiry<br />
<br />
€€€€€1<br />
<br />
€€€€€5<br />
<br />
€€€€€34<br />
<br />
€€€€€37<br />
<br />
€€€€€20<br />
<br />
€€€€€How do you assess yourself?<br />
<br />
€€€€€1st inquiry<br />
<br />
€€€€€0<br />
<br />
€€€€€18<br />
<br />
€€€€€45<br />
<br />
€€€€€26<br />
<br />
€€€€€8<br />
<br />
€€€€€What was your mark at English last year?<br />
<br />
€€€€€1st inquiry<br />
<br />
€€€€€0<br />
<br />
€€€€€19<br />
<br />
€€€€€43<br />
<br />
€€€€€23<br />
<br />
€€€€€12<br />
<br />
€€€€€Do you like English?<br />
<br />
Do you usually study English? Where do you usually study?<br />
<br />
1st inquiry<br />
<br />
Yes - 27<br />
<br />
No - 2<br />
<br />
Sometimes – 65<br />
<br />
2 inquiry<br />
<br />
Yes - 22<br />
<br />
No - 9<br />
<br />
Sometimes – 67<br />
<br />
1st inquiry<br />
<br />
At home - 93<br />
<br />
At school - 4<br />
<br />
Somewhere else – 4<br />
<br />
nd<br />
<br />
€€€€€5<br />
<br />
259<br />
<br />
M-English Podcast<br />
<br />
Figure 1.<br />
<br />
about 7%, which reported no difficulties. From these results, we concluded that the podcast would have to meet these difficulties. As a way of trying to understand what led the students to admit from the performance very well and understand some of their difficulties, it inquired about their study habits (Table 2) at the beginning and at the end of the school year. After analyzing the results, it appeared that there were some changes and that, in fact, some of the difficulties of the students were certainly related to very irregular study habits. The number of students who confessed not study English increased. This may be related to the large number of subjects they have in that school year, sixteen to be precise, much more than in their 6th grade, leading to greater dispersion and having to stay many hours at school. When they get home, they are too tired to make a conscious and structured study of the different subjects. On the other hand, they are young teenagers, the age where they discover other areas of interest to devote their time. The fact that some lived outside the school town also helped. They were dependent on public means of transport, which led to a great waste of time. Despite spending much time in school, home represented the preferred place for studying. We also sought to know the type of resources that students used<br />
<br />
260<br />
<br />
to use to study by checking whether or not they already used ICT for this purpose (Figure 2). In this context, it was found that most students used only traditional resources, with only a small group who admitted using the computer as a resource, about 14%, and the Internet, about 9%. In the second inquiry we wanted to find out if the podcast had been included in their list of resources. Most of the students did: 78%, with a group of 19% who confessed not use as support learning tool for English. This result seems to be related to the interest shown by ICT, where only 2% said they had no interest and 15% appeared to have some interest. This universe of students, 41% showed interest in ICT and 39% admitted to be very interested by the new technologies.<br />
<br />
ICT Skills In order to anticipate logistical problems and the lack of ICT skills, students were asked whether they had a computer and Internet connection at the beginning of the school year (Table 3). It was found that only 19% had no computer, but that 51% had no Internet connection. Here we anticipated difficulties in accessing the podcast. In order to overcome this obstacle and to take forward the implementation of this M-learning<br />
<br />
M-English Podcast<br />
<br />
Figure 2.<br />
<br />
model, we facilitated the files download directly from the teacher’s computer or mobile phone, via Bluetooth. As the students were dealing more with ICT and using their mobile devices, they realized the importance of ICT and of being connected to the broadband. Throughout the school year, the students provided to have a computer and Internet connection. However, 8% still did not have a<br />
<br />
computer, and some of them 19% still had no access to the Internet. We also wanted to check if the students had mobile devices such as mp3 players or mobile phones. As expected, we found that only 9% of students did not have any of these devices. But soon this small group bought one or the other device in order to be engaged in tasks, which meant that all students had MP3 players or mobile phones within a short period of time.<br />
<br />
Table 3. ICT skills €€€€€Likert’s scale<br />
<br />
€€€€€1<br />
<br />
€€€€€2<br />
<br />
€€€€€3<br />
<br />
€€€€€4<br />
<br />
€€€€€5<br />
<br />
How interested are you in ICT?<br />
<br />
€€€€€1 inquiry<br />
<br />
€€€€€0<br />
<br />
€€€€€2<br />
<br />
€€€€€15<br />
<br />
€€€€€41<br />
<br />
€€€€€39<br />
<br />
Did you learn many things about ICT this school year?<br />
<br />
€€€€€2 inquiry<br />
<br />
€€€€€0<br />
<br />
€€€€€3<br />
<br />
€€€€€32<br />
<br />
€€€€€45<br />
<br />
€€€€€17<br />
<br />
st<br />
<br />
nd<br />
<br />
Have you got a PC?<br />
<br />
1st inquiry<br />
<br />
Yes - 78<br />
<br />
No - 19<br />
<br />
Do you have Internet connection?<br />
<br />
1 inquiry<br />
<br />
Yes - 46<br />
<br />
No - 51<br />
<br />
2 inquiry<br />
<br />
Yes - 78<br />
<br />
No - 19<br />
<br />
1 inquiry<br />
<br />
Study - 54<br />
<br />
Entertainment - 81<br />
<br />
2nd inquiry<br />
<br />
Study - 65<br />
<br />
Entertainment - 93<br />
<br />
What do you use the Internet for?<br />
<br />
st<br />
<br />
nd st<br />
<br />
Yes<br />
<br />
No<br />
<br />
Have you got an mp3/4 player or a mobile phone?<br />
<br />
88<br />
<br />
9<br />
<br />
Have you got an e-mail?<br />
<br />
61<br />
<br />
36<br />
<br />
Do you know how to download / upload files?<br />
<br />
35<br />
<br />
62<br />
<br />
261<br />
<br />
M-English Podcast<br />
<br />
We wanted to know what students used the Internet for initially and after they had this new approach. The results showed that entertainment still had a first top position. However, there was a trend in what concerns the use of the Internet to support study. In fact, initially 51% of students reported using the Internet to support the study and in the end, as 75% claimed to use the Internet for that purpose. The students were also asked if they had an e-mail since many of the web tools need it. We concluded that nearly half of the students, more precisely 42%, stated that they had no e-mail address. These included some who occasionally have created one, but no longer were using it or some had forgotten their passwords. It was also of particular interest to this study to know whether the students knew to download or upload files. The results revealed a lack of this skill, since 64% of students answered no to the question. In fact, students did not show to be ICT skilled at the beginning of the school year. This scenario changed during the school year and the students themselves have acknowledged that they learned a lot from the contact they had in class and out of the class. Only 3% of students<br />
<br />
admitted to have learned nothing during the year against 97% who claimed to have learned something, 33%, 43% learned a lot and about 18% claimed to have learned very much.<br />
<br />
Educational Relevance of the Podcast The data describe next refers to the third part of the second inquiry, where we wanted to evaluate the educational relevance of the podcast (Table 4). When the students were asked if the podcast had motivated them to English, the majority (78%) answered affirmatively. When asked whether this tool had helped to improve their knowledge in the English language, 78% of students agreed, as well. Regarding the usefulness of the tool for learning English, the perception of students was almost unanimous, since 93% answered affirmatively. The students’ opinions on the podcast in considering it a complement to the English class, the result was very encouraging: only 4% disagreed, 34% agreed, 38% strongly agreed and 24% agreed entirely. ↜It is also noted that students consider the use of the podcast an innovative approach of<br />
<br />
Table 4. Educational relevance of the podcast €€€€€Likert’s scale<br />
<br />
€€€€€1<br />
<br />
€€€€€2<br />
<br />
€€€€€3<br />
<br />
€€€€€4<br />
<br />
€€€€€5<br />
<br />
The podcast is a complement to the English class.<br />
<br />
€€€€€2 inquiry<br />
<br />
€€€€€0<br />
<br />
€€€€€4<br />
<br />
€€€€€33<br />
<br />
€€€€€37<br />
<br />
€€€€€23<br />
<br />
With the podcast, we learn English differently.<br />
<br />
€€€€€2 inquiry<br />
<br />
€€€€€0<br />
<br />
€€€€€5<br />
<br />
€€€€€21<br />
<br />
€€€€€37<br />
<br />
€€€€€34<br />
<br />
The podcast helps to improve orality.<br />
<br />
€€€€€2nd inquiry<br />
<br />
€€€€€0<br />
<br />
€€€€€5<br />
<br />
€€€€€27<br />
<br />
€€€€€41<br />
<br />
€€€€€24<br />
<br />
The podcast helps to understand contents outside the classroom.<br />
<br />
€€€€€2 inquiry<br />
<br />
€€€€€0<br />
<br />
€€€€€4<br />
<br />
€€€€€28<br />
<br />
€€€€€47<br />
<br />
€€€€€18<br />
<br />
The podcast leads to a greater involvement in activities.<br />
<br />
€€€€€2nd inquiry<br />
<br />
€€€€€0<br />
<br />
€€€€€10<br />
<br />
€€€€€40<br />
<br />
€€€€€30<br />
<br />
€€€€€17<br />
<br />
The podcast helps to improve orality.<br />
<br />
€€€€€2nd inquiry<br />
<br />
€€€€€0<br />
<br />
€€€€€5<br />
<br />
€€€€€27<br />
<br />
€€€€€41<br />
<br />
€€€€€24<br />
<br />
I enjoyed using the podcast<br />
<br />
€€€€€2 inquiry<br />
<br />
€€€€€0<br />
<br />
€€€€€24<br />
<br />
€€€€€37<br />
<br />
€€€€€28<br />
<br />
nd nd<br />
<br />
nd<br />
<br />
nd<br />
<br />
€€€€€8 Yes<br />
<br />
No<br />
<br />
Have you been using the podcast to support your study?<br />
<br />
78<br />
<br />
19<br />
<br />
The podcast “english is fun” motivated you to learning english?<br />
<br />
76<br />
<br />
21<br />
<br />
The podcast helped you to improve your english?<br />
<br />
76<br />
<br />
21<br />
<br />
Do you consider the podcast a useful tool for learning english?<br />
<br />
90<br />
<br />
7<br />
<br />
262<br />
<br />
M-English Podcast<br />
<br />
learning English. Only 5% did not agree against the majority, 95% who answered positively, where 22% agreed, 38% strongly agreed and 35% agreed entirely. The students also agreed about the contribution of this tool in developing their orality, the results to this question show that 28% agreed, 42% strongly agreed and 25% agreed entirely. The podcast also proved to be fruitful with regard to its usefulness as a support learning/ studying tool. The majority of students, 96%, agreed with the question: 19% agreed entirely, 48% strongly agreed, 29% agreed and only 4% disagreed. Another question of the third part of the inquiry wanted to know if the podcast had contributed to the improvement and commitment of students. The results led us to conclude affirmatively, since only 10% disagreed, 41% agreed, 31% strongly agreed and 18% agreed entirely. Finally the students were asked if they enjoyed the podcast. Again, the majority answered positively. Only 8% of students admitted to dislike, 25% enjoyed, 38% enjoyed a lot and 29% loved it.<br />
<br />
Problems Throughout the school year, we decided to choose only a few episodes of the students due to constraints of time. Practices which involve ICT require teachers to have a more careful planning and more time to develop activities. This is undoubtedly a major constraint to the implementation of these practices.<br />
<br />
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS It is common to say that every student is one of a kind in a perspective in regard of each one’s individual characteristics, since students have different learning profiles. However, in a classroom, this attitude is often hampered by the high number of students per class or by beacons of time. So how<br />
<br />
can we teach them how to learn and to manage their learning outside the classroom, or to build their knowledge, when the teacher is not around to lend a hand? One of the great things about Web 2.0 is the wide variety of tools and applications that are available, some deal more with sound, such as the podcast, others with image, like YouTube, or with text, such as blogs. It is known that there are individuals who are better in one or another area. In this context, Neil Fleming, quoted by Pimenta (p. 44, 2003), identifies four types of information processing, classifying them as visual (Visual), auditory (Aural), reading (Read) and kinetic (Kinesthetic), leading to the construction of the acronym VARK. To identify the profile of individual learning, Fleming built a questionnaire to identify the preferences of each individual in the reception and processing of information. This questionnaire is available in the web and it can easily be answered online. The very first questionnaire had been designed for adults and it is now adapted for younger students. It seems interesting for future research to apply the questionnaire to a group of students identifying their different learning styles, and after that working with the more suitable Web tools to the different learning styles. The teacher can thus prepare differentiated educational activities, respecting different rates of learning that, as Pimenta (p. 45, 2003) says, allow the adjustment and the best possible use of various learning styles. This perspective appears to be very interesting when implementing an m-learning model if we consider the phone a “Swiss army knife” (Moura, 2009), adapted to each student, thus developing personal learning environments.<br />
<br />
CONCLUSION The students accepted the implementation of this tool in their learning very well. When asked to comment on this subject, they said that it was<br />
<br />
263<br />
<br />
M-English Podcast<br />
<br />
Figure 3. Failure rate<br />
<br />
definitely something different and innovative and they felt more motivated to English. Another important aspect is the relationship and interaction between students and the teacher, where, according to them, they often felt they were with the teacher at home, creating more ties of complicity. This had an impact of unquestionable quality in the relationship between the teacher and the students. The podcast was widely accepted by most students and it has proved to be very important for students with difficulties at different levels and for good students it worked perfectly. By recording several episodes, it was possible to enhance the communicative skill and proficiency of students in writing and speaking. With the results obtained from the inquiries we came to the conclusion that the main research question was positive. Initially, the failure rate observed in English was 20%. After the implementation of this m-learning model, the failure rate decreased to 13%, so there was a recovery of 7% of students with difficulties in English. These results also reflect the students’ performance and involvement in the tasks and the activities in the English class, which were clearly improved. Given the differences in results from the two inquiries, we could easily find that the motivation and satisfaction of the students for English improved considerably, since only 6% of the 97 students still do not enjoy English. This does not<br />
<br />
264<br />
<br />
mean that some of these students have not been engaged in tasks. The difference between the initial data and the final one also showed us that the students increased ICT skills. They themselves recognize it: 97% claimed to have learned more about ICT. It was clear the students’ approval of this mlearning model using podcast from the results we got from the inquiries or from the comments and attitudes the students frequently showed. Due to the successful results, this experience proved to be rewarding for the teacher and for the students. However, there was an amount of extra work and time spent in planning the activities. This experience with podcast, used as an m-learning model, using the students’ mobile devices turned out to be really good, thus enabling to validate this study.<br />
<br />
REFERENCES Andreoli, V. (2007). O Mundo Digital. (A. S. Fontinha, Trad.). Lisboa: Editorial Presença. Attwell, G. (Janeiro de 2007). Personal Learning Environments - the future of eLearning? Retrieved January 13, 2009, from E-Learning Papers: http://www. elearningeuropa.info/files/media/media11561.pdf Ausubel, D. P. (2003). Aquisição e Retenção de Conhecimentos: Uma Perspectiva Cognitiva. (L. Teopisto, Trad.). Plátano Edições Técnicas.<br />
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M-English Podcast<br />
<br />
Buzato, M. K. (2001). O Letramento Electrónico e o Uso do Computador no Ensino de Língua Estrangeira: Contribuições para a Formação de Professores. Retrieved February 6, 2009, from http:// ead1.unicamp.br/e-lang/publicacoes/down/00/00. pdf Coutinho, C. P., & Chaves, J. H. (2002). O Estudo de Caso na Investigação em Tecnologia em Portugal. Revista Portuguesa de Educação., 15(1), 221–243. Educational Project. (2007). São Martinho Do Campo. Fontichiaro, K. (2008). Podcasting at School. Westport, Connecticut, USA: Libraries Unlimited. Gardner, H. (1993). Multiple Intelligences. Basic Books. Jesus, R., & Moreira, F. (2009). eLearning and Solidarity: The power of Forums. In Handbook of Research on Social Dimensions of Semantic Technologies and Web Services (pp. 448-467). Hershey: Information Science Reference (IGI). Junior, J. B., & Coutinho, C. P. (2007). Podcast em Educação: Um Contributo para o Estado da Arte. Libro de Actas do Congreso Internacional Galego-Português de Psicopedagoxia (pp. 837-846). Coruña: Universidade da Coruña. King, K. P., & Gura, M. (2007). Podcasting for Teachers. Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Publishing, Inc. Menezes, C. Q. (2008). Utilização de Ferramentas ELearning no Contexto de uma Unidade Programática na Aula de Inglês 9º Ano – o Blog. Actas do Encontro sobre Web 2.0 (pp. 306-312). Braga: CIEd, UM. Menezes, C. Q., & Moreira, F. L. (2009). In The Pursuit of M-Learning - First Steps in Implementing Podcast among K12 Students in ESL. Challenges 2009 - Actas da VI Conferência Internacional de TIC na Educação (pp. 91-107). Braga: CCUM.<br />
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Moreira, F., & Paes, C. (2007). Aprendizagem com Dispositivos Móveis: Aspectos Técnicos e Pedagógicos a Serem Considerados num Sistema de Educação. Challenges 2007 – Actas da V Conferência Internacional de Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação na Educação (pp. 23–32). Braga: CCUM. Moura, A. (2009). Geração Móvel: Um Ambiente de Aprendizagem Suportado por Tecnologias Móveis para a “Geração Polegar”. Challenges 2009 - Actas da VI Conferência Internacional de TIC na Educação (pp. 49–77). Braga: CCUM. Moura, A., & Carvalho, A. A. (n.d.). Podcast: uma ferramenta para usar dentro e fora da sala de aula. Retrieved April, 14 2008, from http://ubicomp. algoritmi.uminho.pt/csmu/proc/moura-147.pdf OECD. (2001). Learning to Change: ICT in Schools. Paris: OCDE. Pimenta, P. (2003). Processos de Formação Combinados. Porto: Sociedade Portuguesa de Inovação, S.A. Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. Retrieved May 1, 2009, from http://www. marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20 -%20Part1.pdf Prensky, M. (2006). Don’t Bother Me Mom - I’m Learning - How computer and video games are preparing your kids for 21st century success and how you can help!St. Paul, Minnesota: Paragon House. Ramos, M.A. (2005). Crianças, Tecnologias e Aprendizagem: contributo para uma teoria substantiva. Braga: IEC - Universidade do Minho. PhD Thesis. Resolução do Conselho de Ministros nº 137/2007. Retrieved March 15, 2009, from http://www. portugal.gov.pt/pt/Documentos/Governo/MEd/ Plano_Tecnologico_Educacao_DR.pdf<br />
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Schütz, R. (2007). A Evolução do Aprendizado de Línguas ao longo de um Século. Retrieved January 18, 2009, from http://www.sk.com.br/sk-apren.html Souza, R.A. (Jan.-Jun., 2004). Um Olhar Panorâmico Sobre a Aprendizagem de Línguas Mediada po Computador: dos Drills ao Sociointeraccionismo. Revista Fragmentos, pp. 73-86. Warschauer, M. (2000). The Changing Global economy and the future of English Teaching. TESOL. Quarterly. Warschauer, M. (2004). Technological change and the future of CALL. In Fotos, S., & Brown, C. (Eds.), New Perspectives on CALL for Second and Foreign Language Classrooms (pp. 15–25). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Warschauer, M., & Healey, D. (1998). Computers and Language Learning: An Overview. Retrieved January 6, 2009, from http://www.gse.uci.edu/person/markw/overview.html Warschauer, M., & Meskill, C. (2000). Technology and Second Language Teaching. Retrieved February 7, 2009, from http://www.gse.uci.edu/person/ markw/tslt.html Williams, B. (2007). Educator’s Podcast Guide. Eugene, Oregon, Washington, DC: ISTE.<br />
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ADDITIONAL READING Howatt, A. P., & Widdowson, H. G. (2004). A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kern, R., & Warschauer, M. (2000). Theory and Practice of Network-Based Language Teaching. Retrieved January 15, 2009, from http://www.gse. uci.edu/person/markw/nblt-intro.html<br />
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Maciel, K. D. (2004). Métodos e Abordagens de Ensino de Língua Estrangeira e seus Princípios Teóricos. Retrieved January 16, 2009, from http:// www.apario.com.br/index/boletim34/Unterrichtspraxis-m%E9todos.doc Menezes, C. (2009), Utilização de Dispositivos Móveis na Escola do séc. XXI: o impacto do podcast no processo ensino-aprendizagem da língua inglesa no 7º ano do 3º ciclo do ensino básico. Porto: Departamento de Ciência, Inovação e Tecnologia – Universidade Portucalense Infante D. Henrique. Masters Dissertation. Ribeiro, M. A. (1999). Século XX: o século da controvérsia na Lingüística Aplicada e no Ensino da Gramática. Retrieved January 19, 2009, from http://www.filologia.org.br/anais/anais%20III%20 CNLF%2006.html<br />
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Audacity: Free software for recording podcasts. Episode: An audio/video file posted online. ICT Skills: Skills concerning technical knowhow of Information and Communication Technologies. M-Learning: A model that uses mobile devices to support learning. Mobile Devices: Devices that can store content like mobile phones, mp3/4 players, PDAs, etc. Podcast: A set of episodes (audio/video files) that can be shared with others. Web 2.0: A term that describes the interactive read/write Web.<br />
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Public Safety Networks Giuliana Iapichino EURECOM, France Daniel Câmara EURECOM, France Christian Bonnet EURECOM, France Fethi Filali EURECOM, Qatar<br />
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ABSTRACT Disaster can be defined as the onset of an extreme event causing profound damage or loss as perceived by the afflicted people. The networks built in order to detect and handle these events are called Public safety networks (PSNs). These networks have the fundamental role of providing communication and coordination for emergency operations. Many of the problems of the PSN field come from the heterogeneity of systems and agencies involved in the crisis site and from their mobility at the disaster site. The main aim of this book chapter is to provide a broad view of the PSN field, presenting the different emergency management phases, PSNs requirements, technologies and some of the future research directions for this field.<br />
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INTRODUCTION Public safety networks (PSNs) are networks established by the authorities to either warn and prepare the population for an eminent catastrophe, or as support during the crisis and normalization phases. The characteristics and requirements of these networks may vary considerably depending on their purpose and placement. They are always DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch017<br />
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mission critical; once deployed, PSNs have to be reliable since lives may depend on them. As an example, reports from September 11th point out that communications failures contributed directly to the loss of at least 300 fire-fighters and prevented a good management of the rescue efforts which contributed to the loss of many other lives, (9/11 Commission, 2004), (McKinsey & Co, 2002). Moreover, communication failures were one of the obstacles in the co-ordination of the rescue<br />
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resources in the 1995 Kobe earthquake (Lorin, Unger, Kulling & Ytterborn, 1996). These failures further prevented outsiders from receiving timely information about the severity of the damages. The communication breakdowns delayed the relief efforts which could have prevented the loss of numerous human lives. Reliability of equipments and protocols is a serious matter for any type of network, but it is even more important on the context of PSNs. Maintaining communication capabilities in a disaster scenario is a crucial factor for avoiding preventable loss of lives and damages to property (Townsend & Moss, 2005). During a catastrophe such as an earthquake, power outage or flooding, the main wireless network structure can be severely affected and “historically, major disasters are the most intense generators of telecommunications traffic” (Townsend & Moss, 2005). The public communication networks, even when available, may fail not only because of physical damages, but also as a result of traffic overload. Therefore, the regular public networks alone are often not sufficient to allow rescue and relief operations (Townsend & Moss, 2005). However, equipment failures and lack of connectivity are not the only problems faced by PSNs. Traditionally, PSNs have been owned and operated by individual agencies, such as law enforcement, civil defense and firefighters. Even further, they may belong and obey to commands related to federal, state or municipal governments. All these different PSNs are often not interoperable, which may represent a problem in the case of a catastrophe (Balachandran, Budka, Chu, Doumi, & Kang, 2006). During the last few years some initiatives, such as MESA, have tried to solve the problem of interconnectivity among different agencies. The main objective of this book chapter is to give to the reader a broad view of Public safety networks and to highlight some of the next challenges and research issues on this field. The rest of this chapter is organized as follows: Sections 2 and 3 introduce respectively the disaster manage-<br />
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ment phases and the most important factors for Public safety networks in emergency situations. After that, on Section 4, we present some of the most important tools, projects and initiatives on the field of PSNs. Section 5 describes some of the most challenging aspects of the ongoing research on PSNs, and finally, Section 6 presents some final considerations about the field.<br />
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EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT PHASES Disasters can be of different types: natural disasters, as hurricanes, floods, drought, earthquakes and epidemics, or man-made disasters, as industrial and nuclear accidents, maritime accidents, terrorist attacks. In both cases, human lives are in danger and the telecommunication infrastructures are no longer operational or seriously affected. Disaster management involves three main phases: 1. Preparedness must be to some extent envisaged: ◦⊦ PSN must be operational when some disaster occurs. ◦⊦ To observe the Earth, to detect hazards at an early stage. 2. Crisis from break-out (decision to respond) to immediate disaster aftermath, when lives can still be saved. Crisis is understood as the society’s response to an imminent disaster; it must be distinguished from the disaster itself. 3. Return to normal situation must be envisaged with provisory networks. Figure 1 represents the three main phases of a disaster management in a temporal scale underlining each different state. In this way it is possible to represent all the phases in a state diagram as shown in Figure 2.<br />
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Figure 1. Successive phases of an emergency situation<br />
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Figure 2. Emergency state diagram<br />
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Preparedness The first phase called preparedness involves missions accomplished in normal situation. They are basically of three kinds: 1. Observation. The observation system has two main functions: ◦⊦ Detection of hazards. Satellite can play a role to that respect by means of observation and scientific satellites. A typical case when satellites can detect hazards prior to any other means is meteorological hazards. ◦⊦ Location of the source of hazards. Satellite is nowadays the best means to provide the geographical coordinates of any object thanks to GPS/ Galileo/Glonass constellations. The idea is to have terrestrial sensors<br />
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coupled with a GPS/Galileo/Glonass sensor. 2. Maintenance of the system. An emergency system must be ready to start at any time. To that end, it must be tested at regular time intervals in quiet times from end to end. 3. Education of professionals and citizens.<br />
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Detection of a Hazard In terms of networks, detection may be considered as the essential function of a feeder link or uplink. Detection of a hazard may be done by several means: • <br />
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Systematic watch by professionals e.g. helicopters flying over forests in summertime to detect fires. Sensors involved in a complex network with machine-to-machine connections. Sensors are useful in places where human being can not go (nuclear reactor) or actually rarely goes (water level sensor upward a river to detect inundations).<br />
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Crisis In a situation of crisis the involved parties can be classified in the following way, taking also into account the degree of mobility they need: • <br />
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Local Authority (ies) (LA); fixed: the person (or group of persons) in the administrative hierarchy competent to launch a warning to the population and to the Intervention Teams ; Citizens (Cs); either mobile or fixed: non professional people involved in the crisis. Intervention Teams (ITs); mobile: professionals (civil servants or militaries) in charge of rescuing Citizens in danger, preventing hazard extension or any time critical mission just after the break out of the crisis; in charge of caring injured people once the crisis is over. Risk Management Centre (RMC); fixed: group of experts and managers in charge of supervising operations. The Risk Management Centre works in close cooperation with Local Authorities. Health Centers (HC); fixed: infrastructure (e.g. hospital) dedicated to caring injured citizen and backing intervention teams as for this aspect of their mission.<br />
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Warning It is important to manage properly this critical phase as it is the moment where a quick response<br />
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is the most efficient in terms of lives and goods saved. This means advertising professionals of the incoming hazard. Warning makes sense if and only if there is a delay between the very break out of the hazard and the damages it could cause which leaves time to people to escape. Warning to the population is always Local Authorities’ responsibility since they are the only one who can clearly appreciate the danger depending on local circumstances. Deciding that the situation is critical may be taken at governmental, national level. This is the case for examples for earthquakes in all European countries.<br />
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Crisis Handling Coordination of Intervention Teams begins when the crisis breaks out. The Local Authorities alert them just before the population and then transfer the supervision to the Risk Management Centre. Later on, Intervention Teams still receive instructions from their Local Authorities, from the Risk Management Centre and from the Health Centre. In general, instructions are transmitted through a back-up network made up by a satellite terminal which links the disaster area to terrestrial backbones. It is worth to create a “cell” surrounding the satellite terminal within which Intervention Teams communicate by terrestrial mobile radio means. This is called an EDECC (easily Deployable Emergency Communications Cell). It is a very flexible solution based on radio mobile communication. In an EDECC, it is possible for example recreate a GSM communication cell by means of a mini Base Transceiver Station linked to a Mobile Switch Centre of any operator. Other technologies are possible too (e.g. Wi-Fi). Intervention Teams return information to Local authorities, to the Risk Management Centre, to Health Centers about the situation and request for help. They use one and the same network for receiving instructions and returning feedback.<br />
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Return to Normal Situation At that point, the crisis is over and the situation has come back to a stable point. The ordinary networks are down and it is necessary to set up a network able to work on a regular basis. The main functions of the network are the following: • <br />
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Coordinating intervention teams and returning feedback from the field which is still necessary at that point. As far as possible enabling the same services as before the crisis and offering public access.<br />
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The architecture may be the same as the one outlined above with a satellite link but the network should be more stable and powerful.<br />
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3 IMPORTANT FACTORS FOR PUBLIC SAFETY NETWORKS IN EMERGENCY SITUATIONS A flexible Public Safety Communication infrastructure has some specific requirements that need to be considered within the context of emergency response scenarios (Dilmaghani, & Rao, 2006). They are summarized in the following. Disaster categories: Disasters differ from each other depending on their scale, which is crucial to consider in designing an appropriate response/recovery system. This can be defined by the degree of urbanization or the geographic spread. Degree of urbanization is usually determined by the number of people in the affected area, which is very important in disaster handling as the impact of the event changes based on the number of people involved and the breadth of spatial dispersion, both of which impact response and recovery from disasters.<br />
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Another key factor, which makes a big difference in the response and recovery stage, is whether the disasters have been predicted or not. Clearly, sudden natural or man-made disasters do not give sufficient warning time. Other disasters may give a longer time window to warn people and take appropriate actions. Thus, if there is advance notification, it is potentially possible to set up a better communication infrastructure and possibly even have a backup technology in place before the disaster occurs. Specific technology requirements: Sometimes depending on the nature of disaster, there are more specific communication needs. For example, telemedicine communication may require interactive real-time communication. Transferring data, audio and video require special bandwidth requirements and high network security. The service needs to be reliable and continuous and work with other different first responder organizations’ devices if necessary. Users may have different devices such as laptops, palms, or cell phones which may work with different network technologies such as WLAN, WiMAX, WWAN, Satellite, or wired networks. Additionally a communication network needs to be easily configurable and quickly deployable at low cost. Mobility, reliability and scalability: In order to help emergency personnel to concentrate on the tasks, emergency network should be mobile, deployed easily and fast with little human maintenance. Therefore devices must be capable of automatically organizing into a network. Procedures involved in self-organization include device discovery, connection establishment, scheduling, address allocation, routing, and topology management. The reason for reliability is twofold. First, in emergency situations each rescue worker must neither be isolated from the command center nor from other team members. Second, mobility is likely<br />
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to occur frequently in an emergency network. Thus, ability to adapt to network dynamics and harsh situations plays a major role in the design. Scalability refers to the ability of a system to support large number of parameters without impacting the performance. These parameters include number of nodes, traffic load and mobility aspects. Limited processing and storage capacities of some of the radio devices are also a concern. Interoperability and interdependency: Communication technology provides the tool to send data; however when information is sent over different channels or systems, interoperability may not necessarily have been provided. First responder should be equipped with devices capable of using different technology by choosing the appropriate interface card and still working together to form a mesh network and communicate data. Therefore, regardless of what technology each individual might use, they are uniformly connected to the relaying mesh nodes and able to exchange data. Another factor which needs to be considered in the design of future communication technology is minimizing possible interdependencies in a system. This helps to design a more robust system which is resilient to failures in sub-components of the system. Multimedia broadband services: Communications for the benefit of local rescuers, national authorities or international assistance are mainly to coordinate efforts of field teams and connect teams to remote decision-making centers. In particular, to retrieve monitoring data from the disaster site and to distribute data to local teams or remote expertise centers are important requirements for an emergency communication system. Thus, providing broadband communication capacity during emergency or crisis times is becoming more and more necessary. Concerning services, users’ basic requirements are voice and<br />
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data communications with short and long range capabilities, but users require also multimedia communications with large volume of data able to provide the logistics of the situation, medical data, digital map, blueprints or intelligence data. Knowledge and training: An important factor to be considered as addressed is the lack of knowledge on exact capabilities of the new technology being deployed and lack of training. The new technology needs to be installed and fully tested in drills and preparation exercises well before it is used in an actual disaster. It is also very important to consider who will be the users of this technology and what level of knowledge and technical background they have. We would like to design future emergency communication tools and public awareness systems to be user friendly with minimal training requirements, yet also secure. Information sharing and data dissemination: In some disaster scenarios when people have important information, they may share this information wit the first responders if they feel safe to do so. Not only privacy is a factor that needs to be considered but also mechanisms to verify the accuracy of the information provided. Warnings and alerts: Warning messages should be provided with the consideration that some people may disregard the warnings, therefore even the well-designed warning system must consider human error or resistance. People may not evacuate to safe areas even if asked or ordered to do so for different reasons such as family, belongings, and pets, or they may not trust the accuracy or source of the warning. They may not take the warning serious if they hear different messages from different sources, or if the source of the warning has not proven to<br />
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be accurate or reliable in the past. The warning should provide a clear explanation of the nature of the disaster and appropriate actions to be taken.<br />
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TERRESTRIAL AND SATELLITE PUBLIC SAFETY SYSTEMS FOR EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS: STATE OF THE ART Terrestrial-Based Solutions When faced with a situation of a disaster, rescue forces often rely on very simple communication systems as analogue and digital radio systems described hereafter.<br />
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HF, VHF, UHF Equipments In times of crisis and natural disasters, Amateur radio is often used as a means of emergency communication when wired communication networks, cellular wireless networks and other conventional means of communications fail. High Frequency (HF) designates a range of electromagnetic waves whose frequency is between 3 MHz and 30 MHz. Very High Frequency (VHF) designates a range of electromagnetic waves whose frequency is between 30 MHz and 300 MHz. Ultra High Frequency (UHF) designates a range of electromagnetic waves whose frequency is between 300 MHz and 3.0 GHz. It is the actual most common tool used for communications by rescue teams because UHF is very easy to use and widely deployed in most of countries. Different rescue organizations can use the same frequency and so can communicate with each another (firemen, police officers). This solution is quite limited because the basic services provided by HF, VHF and UHF communication devices are voice.<br />
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PMR The Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) is a communication system, which is composed of portable, mobile, base stations and some console radios. The antenna must be mounted in height. The coverage can vary significantly (between 3 and 7 km for point to point, up to 50 km for an extend networks). The PMR system is actually used by police centers and fire brigades. It is easy to use and to deploy. Many rescue teams are now familiar with these equipments in all the kinds of crises. Some standards have been developed for specific usage and the Trans European Trunked Radio (TETRA) (TETRA, 2009) is the most developed. Several manufacturers propose different terminals for the communications, but all these equipments offer interoperability. The user can choose the manufacturer and the product he prefers. TETRA It is an open digital standard defined by the European Telecommunications Standard Institute (ETSI). The purpose of TETRA is to cover the different needs of traditional user organizations such as public safety, transportation, military and government. TETRA is based on a suite of standards that are constantly evolving. It can support the transportation of voice and data in different ways. It is able to operate in direct mode (DMO) by building local radio nets and in standard mode (TMO). TETRA can thus be used as walkie-talkie (DMO) or as cell phones (TMO). Another mode, called “Gateway” allows TETRA terminals to use a gateway in order to extend the coverage zone. The different network elements of a typical TETRA architecture makes it fully operational with other infrastructures (PSTN, ISDN and/or PABX, GSM, etc.). TETRA provides excellent voice quality through individual calls (one-toone) but also through group communication. This technology can be utilized for emergency calls and ensure secure encrypted communications.<br />
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The Release 2 of TETRA improves the range of the TMO (up to 83 km), introduces new voice codecs and speeds up the transmission of data up to 500 kbps. Thus, the high coverage provided by TETRA, the fast call set-up (less than 1 s), both direct and gateway modes make of TETRA an interesting communication technology.<br />
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Satellite-Based Solutions International rescue forces have nowadays started more and more to use satellite communications. After a disaster, even if the terrestrial network is completely out of order, it remains always possible to communicate using the satellite network. Satellite communications are highly survivable, independent of terrestrial infrastructure, able to provide the load sharing and surge capacity solution for larger sites, best for redundancy: they add a layer of path diversity and link availability. Thus, the benefits of using satellite in emergency communications are: • <br />
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Ubiquitous Coverage: a group of satellites can cover virtually the entire Earth’s surface. Instant Infrastructure: satellite services can be offered in area where there is no terrestrial infrastructure and the costs of deploying a fiber or microwave network are prohibitive. It can also support services in areas where exiting infrastructure is outdated, insufficient or damaged. Independent of Terrestrial Infrastructure: satellite service can provide additional bandwidth to divert traffic from congested areas, provide overflow during peak usage periods, and provide redundancy in the case of terrestrial network outages. Temporary Network Solutions: for applications such as news gathering, homeland<br />
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security, or military activities, satellite can often provide the only practical, short-term solution for getting necessary information in and out. Rapid Provisioning of Services: since satellite solutions can be set up quickly, communications networks and new services can be quickly recovered and reconfigured. In addition, it is possible to expand services electronically without traditional terrestrial networks, achieving a high level of communications rapidly without high budget expenditures.<br />
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In times of disaster recovery, solutions provided via satellite are more reliable than communications utilizing land-based connections.<br />
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Fixed Satellite Services Fixed Satellite Service (FSS) has traditionally referred to a satellite service that uses terrestrial terminals communicating with satellites in geosynchronous orbit. New technologies allow FSS to communicate with mobile platforms. Satellite VSAT Network A satellite Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) network consists of a pre-positioned, fixed, or transportable VSAT that connects to a hub station to provide broadband communications to hospitals, command posts, emergency field operations and other sites. Very small aperture terminal refers to small earth stations, with antennas usually in the 1.2 to 2.4 m range. Small aperture terminals under 0.5 m are referred to Ultra Small Aperture Terminals (USATs). There are also variants of VSATs that are transportable which can be on-theair within 30 minutes and require no special tools or test equipment for installation. Remote FSS VSAT equipment requires standard AC power for operation, but comes equipped with lightweight, 1 and 2KW, highly efficient and self-contained<br />
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power generator equipment for continuous operation, regardless of local power availability. Internet access and Internet applications (i.e. VoIP) are supported through the remote VSAT back through the FSS provider teleport location which is connected to the PSTN and/or the Internet. A typical VSAT used by a first responder may have full two-way connectivity up to several Mbps for any desired combination of voice, data, video, and Internet service capability. VSATs are also capable of supporting higher bandwidth requirements of up to 4 Mbps outbound and up to 10 Mbps inbound.<br />
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Mobile Satellite Services Mobile Satellite Service (MSS) uses portable satellite phones and terminals. MSS terminals may be mounted on a ship, an airplane, truck, or an automobile. MSS terminals may even be carried by an individual. The most promising applications are portable satellite telephones and broadband terminals that enable global service. Satellite Phones Several manufacturers offer mobile phones providing different coverage of the earth (IRIDIUM, 2009), (GLOBALSTAR, 2009), (THURAYA, 2009). In general, satellite phone is very user friendly; it looks like GSM mobile phone with one telephone number and one mini personal subscriber identity module (SIM). Satellite phones are water, shock and dust resistant for rugged environment and offer voice and data services with additional capabilities as call forwarding, twoway SMS, one touch dialling, headset/hands-free capability. The major advantage of this solution is the possibility to phone anywhere, any time, using a satellite link and then the normal public terrestrial phone network.<br />
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offers a number of innovative services (3G like) in the arena of mobile multimedia, video and audio multicasting and advanced broadcasting, with three land portable terminal types. Target users are professional mobile users (on-ground, maritime, aeronautical) in any service area worldwide, except Polar Regions. The service is IP-based and allows data transfer speeds up to 492 kbps, streaming up to 256 kbps. The high levels of portability of BGAN terminals, as well as the easiness of use, make BGAN attractive for emergency services. It is also the first mobile communications service to offer guaranteed data rates on demand. It is relatively EAS to plug a laptop on this equipment and to have an Internet access; this enables the use of IP facilities like Visio conference or other real time applications, with a correct quality thanks to the guaranteed data rate. Currently the solution yet is not very exploited but tends to be developed. Its major advantage is the quasi-total cover of planet thus same that the polar zones and oceans.<br />
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COTM Solution Communications On The Move (COTM) is the most promising solution for emergency communications. FSS and MSS COTM solutions can provide fully mobile IP data and voice services to vehicles on the move up to 100 km/h (Figure 3). The comprehensive FSS COTM offering includes<br />
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Figure 3. COTM equipments<br />
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BGAN System Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) from Inmarsat (BGAN, 2009) operates in L-band and<br />
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the terminal, teleport, and satellite capacity to provide high performance COTM IP connectivity. Typical applications supported:<br />
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plications like videoconference, telemedicine, cartography can be used thanks the internet access provided by the van.<br />
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Any vehicle can also serve as a mobile command post while in-route and as a fixed command access point for personnel upon arrival at the designated location when local Telco terrestrial and wireless infrastructures are not available. A full 10 Mbps downlink channel is delivered via FSS to the vehicle and 512 Kbps uplink channel transmitted from the vehicle to the Internet using IP support for voice, video and data simultaneously. Support for 802.11x wireless access allows vehicle to function as wireless hot spot access point for a First Responder convoy while in-route or a fixed hot spot for personnel upon arrival.<br />
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Hybrid Satellite/Terrestrial Solutions TRACKS TRACKS (TRACKS, 2005) deals with the development of the prototype of a van transportable communication station (VSAT terminal, GSM Micro Switch, BSC and BTS, internet access) dedicated to support pre-operational applications. It represents a good candidate telecom solution in case of crisis, when terrestrial communication are damaged or destroyed after a disaster. TRACKS is deployed on the disaster area by local rescue teams. A local command centre can be deployed using the services provided by the van. Thanks to the satellite link, the teams are directly connected to a global command centre, which collect all the information (weather forecast, satellite images) and coordinate the local actions. Thanks to the Wi-Fi Equipments, the rescue team on site can use the network developed by TRACKS with the office tools: PC, PDA and laptop. The services are not limited. Some ap-<br />
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Emergesat (EMERGESAT, 2009) is a system developed by Thales Alenia Space as an initiative funded by the French government in response to needs of responding to humanitarian crises. Emergesat is basically a container specially designed in its dimensions, weight and the composite materials used in its construction, for transport in the luggage hold of any passenger line aircraft. It has rings for slinging under a helicopter, and is seal-tight under the most extreme weather conditions and totally autonomous in terms of power supply. The basic container incorporates its own communication equipment, and can also be used to transport a complete, autonomous water purification plant or small medical centre. The core of the Emergesat communication system is a satellite transceiver unit, providing for high-rate communication from any point on the globe. Its automatic dish antenna ensures that the system can be placed in service immediately. A GSM transmission BTS connected to the satellite system makes it possible to set up a complete GSM network. A long-range Wi-Fi network system provides for connection with a large action perimeter. A remote server collects all information required by the rear support bases. A software suite enables the operational teams to keep themselves fully informed about the evolution of the crisis, treatment of victims, civil engineering problems, etc. in real time. This system is fully open to all users. The teams in the field can hook up using a conventional tool (PC, PDA, etc.), and obtain information and decision-making aid services, including cartography, meteorology, languages and dialects, and also access collaborative working tools such as videoconference, messaging, application sharing.<br />
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Emergency Alert Systems Emergency alert systems play an important role on many countries and have also evolved and received considerable investment through time. For example, only in 2009 the budget requested to develop the new American EAS, the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS), was 37 million dollars, (Congressional Budget Office, 2008). IPAWS development is under the responsibility of the Federal Emergency management Agency, (FEMA, 2009). When complete it will permit the broadcast of emergency messages not only through radio and TV but also by e-mail, cell phones and other different mediums. During a test pilot conducted in 2007 in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi the system was able to send alerts to 60,000 residential phones in ten minutes and also with Spanish and Vietnamese translations, (FEMA, 2009). The Japanese nationwide warning system, J-Alert, was launched in February 2007. It uses satellite wireless communication to issue a simultaneous warning to all municipal governments and interested agencies, (Kaneda, Kobayashi, Tajima, & Tosaki, 2007). J-Alert works with warn<br />
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sirens and an emergency broadcast system. The system is automatically activated and, from the time an emergency is confirmed, it is able warn the population in less than 7 seconds. Ratcom project, (RATCOM, 2009), depicted at Figure 4, is one of the next generation EAS dedicated to detect and warn tsunamis on the Mediterranean Sea. When Ratcom will become operational, sensors will capture data and, if a real anomaly is detected, warning messages will be distributed automatically over the endangered region. The Ratcom alert system is composed of two main components: one ascendant and one descendant. The ascendant component is responsible for sensing the related data, filter false positives and retransmitting the relevant collected information to the coordination center. The descendant component is responsible for spreading the information of the imminent dangerous situation among the authorities and population in general.<br />
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Public Safety Network Projects Public safety networks have attracted much research interest on the last few years. This section<br />
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Figure 4. Ratcom project main architecture<br />
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will present some research projects conducted on the field of PSNs. The CHORIST project, (CHORIST, 2009), is funded by the European Commission, and addresses Environmental Risk Management in relation to natural hazards and industrial accidents, (CHORIST, 2009). The backbone topology, depicted in Figure 5, is composed of Cluster Heads (CHs), Mesh Routers (MRs) and Relay Nodes (RNs). All the nodes’ roles must be defined dynamically and based only on local information. The WIDENS project, (WIDENS, 2006), was a European project that aimed to design and prototype a next generation of interoperable wideband Public safety networks. The project was concluded in 2006 and successfully proposed an easily deployable system for PSNs. Many of the results of the WIDENS project were incorporated in the MESA project. MESA project, (MESA, 2009), is an international ongoing project in partnership between the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) to create a global specification for mobile broadband public safety and disaster response networks. The mobile broadband specifications produced by the MESA project will touch the most different aspects and<br />
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technologies related to PSNs, from remote patient monitoring to broadband satellite constellations interconnection, passing through mobile robotics and network reliability algorithms.<br />
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FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS When a large scale disaster strikes, first responders are sent to the site immediately. One of the main needs of these teams is communication to efficiently organize the first responders operations. Unfortunately the disaster site may either not present a previous network infrastructure or this could have been damaged by the disaster itself. The communication infrastructure needs to be reliable and interoperable with the existing responder organizations’ devices in a distributed system. Additionally, it needs to be easily configurable and quickly deployable at low cost. The system should be designed in a modular fashion that is easily upgradeable with the technology evolvement without the need to replace the entire system. This leads to an economic deployment solution which is affordable for different public and private agencies. Furthermore, it is desirable to provide redundancy for an effective network<br />
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Figure 5. CHORIST network description and components<br />
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management based on the trade-off between reliability and cost. Wireless Mesh network (WMN) infrastructure well fulfils these application domain’s specific requirements (Portmann, & Pirzada, 2008), but to assess its complete suitability to Public Safety and disaster recovery applications, it is necessary to include mobility support requirements to WMNs.<br />
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technology is suitable to every environment and every situation, seamless smart controls for the lower layers adaptation would enable the creation of better and more useful upper layer applications.<br />
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MAC Layer Challenges<br />
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The deployment and the management of nodes for WMNs are challenging problems and they become even more interesting when we consider them in the context of PSNs environment. Not only PSNs are, by nature, life-critical but they also have strict requirements. Moreover, these requirements may vary significantly for different disaster sites, (Huang, He, Nahrstedt, & Lee, 2008). For example, the number of nodes, people served, mobility pattern and deployment environment for a forest fire fight differs from the ones for an earthquake relief effort. Well defined and maintained network structure is a fundamental step to enable the creation of efficient higher layer algorithms (Rajaraman, 2005). In this sense topology control becomes a fundamental step to enhance scalability and capacity for large-scale wireless ad hoc networks (Santi, 2005). The main concerns in the establishment of public safety networks are rapid deployment and survivability, (Bao, & Lee, 2007). PSNs must be reliable and endure even when deployed through rough environments. The network organization is a key factor to ensure endurance. In general, for small environments, the deployment of plain mesh networks is the easiest and fastest way to set a network in the field. However, this kind of structure is hardly scalable and appropriate for use on large scale and reliable environments. Structured networks, on the other hand, are more scalable, but the price to pay for this is the creation and maintenance of the structure. Midkiff & Bostian (2002) present a two layer network deployment method to organize PSNs. Their network consists of a hub, and possible<br />
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Public safety networks present many challenges regarding the Medium Access Control and Physical (MAC/PHY) layers. Communication systems for this kind of network must to be reliable and robust to failures. A rupture on the MAC/PHY level will compromise the whole purpose of the network. This is also true for any kind of network, but because they may be deployed in highly unstable environments, e.g. firewood site, robustness is especially important in the context of PSNs. In this sense one of the most important research aspects for MAC/PHY layer research for PSNs is to provide robust and reliable protocols. On the other hand, past PSNs were narrow band access only, enough for voice communication but not for multimedia applications. However, data-intensive multimedia applications have the potential to greatly improve the quality of the work and efficiency of first responders and relief efforts. For example, being able to download the blue prints of a industrial disaster site, on line and on demand, can give to fire-fighters valuable hints of the best way to proceed during their operations. Wideband access with support for many different classes of Quality of Services (QoS) will be, on the next few years, more than desirable, will be mandatory for PSNs. Nowadays we have many different wireless technologies in use, the integration and interoperability of such technologies is another big challenge for PSNs. However, the challenge is bigger than only taking care of the integration of the many technologies. Not necessarily the same<br />
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Network Layer Challenges Topology Control<br />
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many purpose specific routers, to provide access to nodes in the field. However, this work presents two characteristics that would be interesting to avoid in the PSN context. First, the hub represents a single point of failure. If something happens to it, all the communication would be down, even between nodes inside the field. It is important for PSNs to be as resilient as possible. The second issue is long range communications, all transmissions must pass through the hub, so the messages may transverse twice the whole network. Sarrafi, Firooz & Barjini (2006) also present another interesting algorithm for topology control focusing, the power consumption optimality of the network. Câmara & Bonnet (2009), consider the problem of different deployment sites having different requirements and present a technique to dynamic adapt the topology to different requirements. The technique is inspired in the economy laws of supply and demand to dynamically organize the network. The authors argue that these economic concepts can perfectly map the main requirements of a topology management algorithm (stability, load balancing and connection demand). The first law of supply and demand states that when demand is greater than supply, prices rise and when supply is greater than demand, prices fall. These forces depend on how great the difference between supply and demand is. The second law of supply and demand, then, states that the greater the difference between supply and demand is, the greater are the forces on prices. The third law states that prices tend to the equilibrium point, where supply is equal to demand. These same concepts are used to control the network behavior. Câmara & Bonnet defined a cost function to enable the network to self-organize and manage its topology and admission control.<br />
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Mobility Management PSNs may involve different equipments used by different Public Safety agencies, which need to move from the coverage of one mobile mesh<br />
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router to another transparently and seamlessly, relaying on a dynamic, easy to configure and scalable infrastructure at the disaster site. There is an urgent need for a local mobility management scheme for PSNs to support location and handoff management, as well as interoperability between different heterogeneous Public Safety organizations and terminals. Different solutions try to support mobility management in different layers of the TCP/IP protocol stack reference model. IP-based heterogeneous PSNs can greatly benefit of a network layer solution, which provides mobility-related features at IP layer without relying on or making assumption about the underlying wireless access technologies. Mobility management enables the serving networks to locate a mobile subscriber’s point of attachment for delivering data packets (i.e., location management) and maintain a mobile subscriber’s connection as it continues to change its point of attachment (i.e., handover management). Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) (Johnson, Perkins, & Arkko, 2004) is one of the most representative efforts on the way toward next generation all-IP mobile networks. MIPv6 is a well-known mature standard for IPv6 mobility support and solves many problems seen in Mobile IPv4 (MIPv4) (Perkins, 2002). However, despite the reputation of this protocol, it has been slowly deployed in real implementations over the past years, and does not appear to receive widespread acceptance in the market. Furthermore, it has still revealed some problems such as handover latency, packet loss, and signaling overhead. Therefore, various MIPv6 enhancements such as Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) (Soliman, Castelluccia, El Malki, & Bellier, 2005) and Fast Handover for Mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6) (Koodli, 2005) have been reported over the past years, mainly focused on performance improvement in MIPv6. However, MIPv6 and its various enhancements are hostbased mobility management protocols which require mobile nodes (MNs) to be involved in the mobility signaling messages and, therefore, they<br />
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basically require protocol stack modification of the MNs in order to support them. In addition, the requirement for modification of MNs may cause increased complexity on them. Recently, a network-based mobility management protocol called Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) (Gundavelli, Leung, Devarapalli, Chowdhury, & Patil, 2008) is being actively standardized by the IETF NETLMM working group. It is starting to attract considerable attention among the telecommunication and Internet communities and we believe it has great potentialities in the field of PSNs. With PMIPv6 the serving network handles the mobility management on behalf of the MN; thus, the MN is not required to participate in any mobility-related signaling. No requirement for modifications on Public Safety terminals is expected to accelerate the practical deployment of PMIPv6 for PSNs as any type of equipment from rescue teams can be used. Moreover, as the serving network at the disaster site controls the mobility management on behalf of the Public Safety users, the tunneling overhead as well as a significant number of mobility-related signaling message exchanges via wireless links can be reduced. Moreover, the handover latency is also massive reduced due to the fact the terminals keep their IPv6 addresses independently from their points of attachment to the deployed network, thus eliminating the procedures of Duplicate Address Detection (DAD), which represents one of the most time-consuming phases during handoff. Taking into account all these considerations, PMIPv6 may become an important candidate for mobility management in PSNs (Iapichino, Bonnet, Del Rio Herrero, Baudoin, & Buret, 2009).<br />
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Application Layer Challenges As already specified in the requirements of PSNs, it is important to provide mobility support to rescue teams ensuring connection always on during their movements in the disaster field and, at the same time, security and reliability, thus multihom-<br />
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ing, to the system architecture at the crisis area. Although many of these requirements have been widely recognized for some time, a complete and adequate solution is still missing. Most existing approaches are point-solutions that patch support for a subset of the required improvements into the current Internet architecture, but do not cleanly integrate with each other and do not present a stable base for future evolution. As an example, Mobile IP (Perkins, 2002) (Johnson, Perkins, & Arkko, 2004) provides some support for host mobility, but still has major security flaws that prevent its widespread deployment. The main problem comes from the fact that the IP address is used for describing the topological location of the host and, at the same time, to identify the host. Host Identity Protocol (HIP) (Moskowitz, Nikander, Jokela, & Henderson, 2008) is a promising new basis for a secure mobile architecture for future PSNs (Iapichino, Bonnet, Del Rio Herrero, Baudoin, & Buret, 2009). The cornerstone of HIP is the idea of separating a host’s identity from its present topological location in the Internet. HIP introduces a Host Identifier (HI) for each MN and a new layer between the network and the transport layer. In HIP, the transport layer connections are bound to the Host Identity Tag (HIT), a 128-bit hash of the HI, not anymore to the IP address. This simple idea provides a solid basis for mobility and multihoming features (Nikander, Henderson, Vogt, & Arkko, 2008). HIP also includes security as an inherent part of its design, because its host identities are cryptographic keys that can be used with many established security algorithms and cryptographic identities are used to encrypt all data traffic between two HIP hosts by default.<br />
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CONCLUSION This book chapter provided a broad view of the PSNs field explaining the emergency management phases, challenges and research directions related<br />
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to PSNs. Public safety networks play an important role in every one of the emergency management phases and, because lives may depend on them, PSNs are mission critical. They are a growing research field, which regards all the phases. This is due to the fact that, not only there are still many open problems that need to be solved, but also researchers are always trying to find better ways to improve the available infrastructure at the disaster site to provide faster and better solutions to detect hazards, manage crisis and return to the normal situation.<br />
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REFERENCES 9/11 Commission (2004). National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. 2004. The 9/11 Commission Report: final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Retrieved October 13, 2009, from http://www.9-11commission.gov. Balachandran, K., Budka, K. C., Chu, T. P., Doumi, T. L., & Kang, J. H. (2006, January). Mobile Responder Communication Networks for Public Safety, IEEE Communications Magazine. Bao, J. Q., & Lee, W. C. (2007, November). Rapid deployment of wireless ad hoc backbone networks for public safety incident management. In Proc. IEEE Globecom. BGAN. (2009). Broadband Global Area Network from Inmarsat. Retrieved October 13, 2009, from http://www.inmarsat.com/Services/Land/BGAN/ default.aspx Câmara, D., & Bonnet, C. (2009, June), Topology Management for Public safety networks, International Workshop on Advanced Topics in Mobile Computing for Emergency management: Communication and Computing Platforms (MCEM 2009), ACM, Leipzig, Germany.<br />
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CHORIST. (2009). CHORIST, A European Commission project. Retrieved October 13, 2009, from http://www.chorist.eu Congressional Budget Office (2008, October), H.R. 6658 Disaster Response, Recovery, and Mitigation Enhancement Act of 2008, Congressional Budget Office Cost Estimate. Dilmaghani, R. B., & Rao, R. R. (2006, June), On Designing Communication Networks for Emergency Situations, In Proc. IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS 2006). EMERGESAT. (2009). Emergesat from Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales website, Retrieved October 13, 2009, from http://www.cnes.fr/web/ CNES-en/4972-emergesat.php FEMA. (2009). Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS), FEMA website, Retrieved October 13, 2009, from http://www.fema. gov/emergency/ipaws/. GLOBALSTAR. (2009). GLOBALSTAR. Retrieved October 13, 2009, from http://www.globalstareurope.com/en/ Gundavelli, S., Leung, K., Devarapalli, V., Chowdhury, K., & Patil, L. (2008, August). Proxy Mobile IPv6, IETF RFC 5213. Huang, Y., He, W., Nahrstedt, K., & Lee, W. C. (2008, May), Incident Scene Mobility Analysis, IEEE Conference on Technologies for Homeland Security: Enhancing Critical Infrastructure Dependability. Iapichino, G., Bonnet, C., Del Rio Herrero, O., Baudoin, C., & Buret, I. (2009, June). Combining Mobility and Heterogeneous Networking for Emergency management: a PMIPv6 and HIP-based Approach, International Workshop on Advanced Topics in Mobile Computing for Emergency management: Communication and Computing Platforms (MCEM 2009),ACM, Leipzig, Germany.<br />
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IRIDIUM. (2009). IRIDIUM. Retrieved October 13, 2009, from http://www.iridium.com/. Johnson, D., Perkins, C., & Arkko, J. (2004, June). Mobility Support in IPv6, IETF RFC 3775. Kaneda, H., Kobayashi, K., Tajima, H. & Tosaki H. (2007, March). Japan’s Missile Defense: Diplomatic and Security Policies in a Changing Strategic Environment, Japan Institute of International Affairs. Koodli, R. (2005, July). Fast Handovers for Mobile IPv6, IETF RFC 4068. Lorin, H., Unger, H., Kulling, P., & Ytterborn, L. (1996). The great Hanshin-Awaji (Kobe) earthquake January 17, 1995, KAMEDO Report No 66. SoS Report, 1996, 12. McKinsey & Co. (2002), IncrEASing FDNY’s Preparedness”, City of New York: New York City Fire Department web site, Retrieved October 13, 2009, from http://www.nyc.gov/html/fdny/html/ mck_report/toc.html MESA. (2009), Project MESA - Mobile Broadband for Public Safety, Retrieved October 13, 2009, from http://www.projectmesa.org/ Midkiff, S. F., & Bostia, C. W. (2002, June), Rapidly-deployable broadband wireless networks for disaster and emergency response. In Proc. First IEEE Workshop on Disaster Recover Networks. Moskowitz, R., Nikander, P., Jokela, P., & Henderson, T. (2008, April). Host Identity Protocol, IETF RFC 5201. Nikander, P., Henderson, T., Vogt, C., & Arkko, J. (2008, April). End-Host Mobility and Multihoming with the Host Identity Protocol, IETF RFC 5206. Perkins, C. (2002, August). IP Mobility Support for IPv4, IETF RFC 3344.<br />
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Portmann, M., & Pirzada, A. A. (2008, January). Wireless mesh networks for Public Safety and Crisis Management Applications. IEEE Internet Computing, 12(1), 18–25. doi:10.1109/ MIC.2008.25 Rajaraman, R. (2005), Topology control and routing in ad-hoc networks: a survey, SIGACT News, vol. 33, pp. 60-73, Jan.2002. RATCOM. (2009). RATCOM, the Risk prevention, RATCOM website, Retrieved October 13, 2009, from http://ratcom.org/default.aspx. Santi, P. (2005, July), Topology control in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks. New York: Wiley. Sarrafi, A., Firooz, M. H., & Barjini, H. (2006, October), A Cluster Based Topology control Algorithm for Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks, International Conference on Systems and Networks Communication. Soliman, H., Castelluccia, C., El Malki, K., & Bellier, L. (2005, August). Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 Mobility management, IETF RFC 4140. TETRA. (2009). TETRA, Terrestrial Trunked Radio, Retrieved October 13, 2009, from http:// www.tetra-association.com/. THURAYA. (2009). THURAYA. Retrieved October 13, 2009, from http://www.thuraya.com/ Townsend, A. M., & and Moss, M. L. (2005, May), Telecommunications Infrastructure in Disasters: Preparing Cities for Crisis Communications, Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response & Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, New York University. TRACKS. (2005). TRACKS, Transportable Station for Communication Network Extension by Satellite from European Space Agency website, Retrieved October 13, 2009, from http:// telecom.esa.int/telecom/www/object/index. cfm?fobjectid=11550<br />
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WIDENS. (2006). WIDENS, Wireless Deployable Network System, Retrieved October 13, 2009, from http://www.comlab.hut.fi/projects/WIDENS/<br />
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Public Safety Networks: The kind of networks deployed by authorities to handle crisis situations in the event of a catastrophe. Alert Phase: When the population needs to be informed about an eminent threat or the occurred disaster. Catastrophe: As an extreme event causing a profound damage or loss as perceived by the afflicted people.<br />
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Crisis Handling: Consists of the measures taken by the authorities to deal with the disaster. Emergency Alert Systems: Systems design to alert the population in case of an eminent hazard. Mesh Network: A kind of spontaneous network where the nodes may have a limited mobility pattern. Satellite Communication: A satellite link communication channel that can be started at any place in the globe. Topology Management: Build and maintain a defined topology for the desired network.<br />
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Chapter 18<br />
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Mobile Applications as Mobile Learning and Performance Support Tools in Psychotherapy Activities Maria Luisa Pérez-Guerrero Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain Jose María Monguet-Fierro Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain Carmina Saldaña-García Universidad de Barcelona, Spain<br />
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ABSTRACT The purpose of the chapter is the analysis of mobile applications as performance and informal learning support tools that facilitate the development of the psychotherapy process. The “e-therapy” has become a common term to refer the delivery of mental health services, on-line or related to a computer mediated communication between a psychotherapist and the patient. Initially, a background on e-therapy will be provided through the analysis of the existing related literature, the description of the state of the art. After this general view as starting point, the “self-help therapy”–a kind of e-therapy where the concept of patient empowerment is important– will be exposed to depict the importance of patient activities beyond the clinical settings in the rehabilitation process. Then, the integration of mobile devices in the psychotherapy process will be explained considering how their technological features support patient therapeutic activities like behavior assessment and informal mobile learning. The relation of the mobile devices with psychotherapist work activities such as evidence gathering and patient monitoring will also be explained. The chapter follows with a discussion on the mobile learning practices as a source of potential strategies that can be applied in the therapeutic field and finally a set of recommendations and future directions are described to explore new lines of research. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch018 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.<br />
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Mobile Applications as Mobile Learning and Performance Support Tools in Psychotherapy Activities<br />
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INTRODUCTION The integration of mobile applications with existing therapies or treatments is relatively new, and has not been studied in depth. This chapter falls within the area of psychology, and more specifically within the process of psychotherapy, considered as one continuous interactive process from the perspective of the information systems. The integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in therapy enhances or facilitates particular stages of the process. The field that relates ICTs to psychotherapy is known as e-therapy, and self-help therapy is one kind of therapy-ICT practices supported by mobile devices. Mobile applications (using mobile devices) provide greater validity and generalizability, since data are collected in the patient’s natural environment. Therapy process requires an informal learning process in the patient; performance support and mobile devices are useful tools for these purposes. Therefore, the mobile learning strategies have a potential application and may allow the exploration of new practices in the e-therapy field. This offers an interesting field for the ICT research. The main challenge in this new field is that application developers and therapists understand the strengths and weaknesses of the technology in order to integrate it into appropriate pedagogical –learning– and therapy practices.<br />
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BACKGROUND Telehealth, E-Health and E-Therapy The integration and acceptance of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) in the field of psychology is yet an incomplete process. The only activities pursued up to now in this area have been related in most of the cases to applications of personal computers (PCs). Internet tools such as e-mail, websites, videoconferences, chats, and<br />
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forums are used to support both synchronous and asynchronous activities between patients and therapists, and even among patients. According to the existing literature, the integration of mobile applications to therapies or treatments is rare and limited. The potential of these applications as auxiliary tools has not been studied in depth. This chapter falls within the area of psychology, and more specifically within the process of psychotherapy. The study of the psychotherapeutic process has been conducted from the perspective of information systems, i.e. the way in which ICTs have been integrated as support tools for the system known as psychotherapy. The main goal is to determine whether it is possible to integrate applications in mobile devices to produce tools that facilitate the development of a number of therapeutic activities. This section provides definitions for the most important concepts used to tackle the relation between psychotherapy and ICTs. Psychotherapy is a relation built throughout a series of collaborative sessions between psychotherapists and their patients. It is a continuous interactive process that takes place traditionally in a face-to-face format, using a verbal language or a written one. For any kind of psychotherapy to be effective, communication must occur and a relationship between patient and therapist must be established. (Grohol, 2001) Psychotherapeutic work is generally supported through communication tools such as paper, the telephone or even videotapes. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) provides new tools that can be successfully applied to psychotherapy. These ICTs do not substitute traditional techniques and approaches, but they could be integrated into the clinical process, in order to enhance or facilitate particular stages of the process. (Castelnuovo, 2003). During the integration process, new concepts have arisen, such as telehealth, which can be defined as the use of telecommunications and information technologies to provide access to<br />
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health information, assessment, diagnosis, intervention, consultation, supervision, education, and follow-up programs across geographical distance. (Castelnuovo, 2003) The concept of telehealth is used to describe the relation between ICTs and health. Two main categories are employed: ehealth and e-therapy. The concept of telehealth is, in general, used to describe the relation between ICTs and health. Two main categories of telehealth are employed: e-health and e-therapy. E-health describes the relation between physical health and ICTs, while e-therapy refers to the relation between mental health and ICTs, particularly when Internet is used along with other auxiliary technologies such as mobile devices. There are other therapeutic cases related to the psychology field which also involve ICT integration, but do not have a specific designation, such as virtual reality used in the treatment of phobias. The first approaches to the e-therapy field were known as e-mental health, to differentiate them from the more general field of e-health. This concept was used to designate the first online mental health service, which appeared on the Internet as early as 1982 through online self-help support groups. (Kanani, 2003) The idea that the Internet could be employed to provide psychological help was conceived in the mid-1990s. (Barak, 2007) Fee-based e-therapy was provided by a number of individuals in private practice as early as 1995, and by 1999 there were more than 250 private practice e-therapy websites. (Ainsworth, 2001 in Finn, 2002). The more broadly accepted definitions for these concepts are: a) E-health “is an emerging field in the intersection of medical informatics, public health and business, referring to health services and information delivered or enhanced through the Internet and related technologies. In a broader sense, the term characterizes not only a technical development, but also a state-of-<br />
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mind, a way of thinking, an attitude, and a commitment for networked, global thinking, to improve health care locally, regionally, and worldwide by using information and communication technology”(Eysenbach, 2008) b) E-therapy is “a new modality of helping people resolve life and relationship issues. It utilizes the power and convenience of Internet to allow simultaneous (synchronous) and time-delayed (asynchronous) communication between an individual and a professional” (Grohol, 2008) E-therapy does not modify theories, techniques, and methods typical of each approach (psychoanalytic, systemic, cognitive, behavioral, interpersonal, strategic, etc.), but could affect the communication level and thus the possible relationships and alliances between therapists and patients. E-therapy does not substitute psychotherapy or psychological counseling, since it does not pretend to diagnose or treat mental or medical disorders (Manhal-Baugus, 2001). E-therapy is the field that relates ICTs to psychotherapy. The practices done with mobile devices have been included in this field because mobile therapy is still at a very early stage of development and has not consolidated enough to constitute a field of study fully independent from e-therapy.<br />
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Types of E-Therapy E-therapy includes the communication and information processes established on Internet with therapeutic goals and which, occasionally, are supported by mobile technologies. Different terms referring to this concept were found in the related literature: e-therapy, online therapy, cybertherapy, web counseling, behavioral telehealth, or telepsychiatry. (Heinlen K.T., 2003). The elements that define the different types of e-therapy are:<br />
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1. The roles within therapy: Basically, therapy participants are therapists and patients. Therapists may offer individual therapies, supervise therapy groups or not participate at all. Patients may interact individually with the therapist or act as personal trainers or counselors to other patients. They may also consult the online information offered for the specific therapy and follow it on their own without interacting with other people. 2. The types of interaction: These include individual psychotherapy, self-help therapy, and self-help groups. Individual psychotherapy: Provision of individual psychotherapy and consultation over Internet with a therapist’s intervention. Self-help therapy: Provision of individual psychotherapy and consultation over Internet with or without a therapist’s intervention. Self-help groups: Provision of group psychotherapy and consultation over Internet with or without a therapist’s intervention.<br />
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Figure 1. E-therapy components<br />
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3. The communication methods or tools: Kanani (2003) lists the following PC-based communication methods: e-mail (regular or encrypted), web-based instant messaging (IM), real-time chat, videoconferencing, voice-over IP (i.e. Internet phone). Some of these methods are also used in mobile devices: e-mail (regular or encrypted), short message service SMS, real-time chat, videoconferencing, phone service, on-line Internet services, off-line software applications. This means that users are already acquainted with some of the methods, so that their use on mobile devices is not a new process. This increases the possibilities of success when integrating the said methods into the development of therapies. User abilities are not the only determining factor behind the use of some communication methods. Cost of use must also be considered, as well as availability and access in different geographical areas.<br />
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4. Types of information: According to their main function, online sites are classified as follows: Information dissemination: These sites concentrate mainly on educational and consciousnessraising issues. They often adopt the form of web pages which provide easy-to-understand and helpful information on a range of disorders, self-help checklists, and links to other helpful websites. Peer-delivered therapy/support/advice (such as a self-help support groups): These sites are often set up by traditional help agencies that have expanded their services to include an online option for their clients. This is typically done by e-mail and is usually free of charge (for example, Samaritans include several 12-Step groups who meet online). Professionally delivered treatment: These sites are becoming more and more common and can be set up by individual counselors and/or psychotherapists. They usually operate in one of two ways: either through written answers to e-mail inquiries or real-time conversations in an Internet “chat room”. (Griffiths M., 2003) 5. Synchronicity of interaction: When patient and therapist are sitting at the same time in front of the computer screen and interacting, Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) is said to be synchronous. When communication is not established simultaneously, CMC is asynchronous. (Castelnuovo, 2003)<br />
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Self-Therapy Self-help therapy also uses mobile devices as support tools. Self-help information is found in the form of written, visual, audio or recorded material which provides a treatment program designed to be self-administered by patients, with or without a therapist’s guidance. (Botella, 2000; Castelnu-<br />
<br />
ovo, 2003) Self-help is clearly more effective than no treatment at all and just as effective in most cases as treatment administered by a therapist. The effectiveness of self-help procedures has been acknowledged for a wide variety of psychological problems, such as phobias, obesity, sexual dysfunctions, and tobacco addiction. Self-help therapy can work individually or in groups. Self-help support groups were created when online discussion boards appeared to offer help among peers. Some dynamic factors became evident within these kinds of groups, such as group cohesion, catharsis, and leadership, which contribute to build confidence among participants. One advantage of self-help groups is that members encourage each other to share experiences and emotional support to relieve feelings of isolation. These kinds of groups represent an alternative or auxiliary tool to traditional therapy, which diminishes the feeling of dependence on the therapist. (Castelnuovo, 2003) The most widely used tools within online self-help groups are bulletin boards, chat rooms, news, discussion groups operating within healthrelated web pages, list servers (groups in which every individual message is copied and e-mailed to all subscribers), and other electronic forums focused on sharing and solving psychological disturbances. Mailing lists, newsgroups, bulletin boards and forums have always been popular among people in need of advice because there is always someone online who has BTDT (“been there, done that”!) (Griffiths, 2003). Mandara (1990, quoted in Castelnuovo 2003), mentions other advantages of self-help groups: social support, practical information, exchange of experiences, role models, and therapeutic help.<br />
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Mobile Application as Support Tools Norton et al. (2003) refer to the use of mobile applications as a mean to provide or enhance existing therapies. Compared to PCs, PDAs are smaller and lighter, and they offer significant<br />
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advantages in psychotherapy thanks to the following characteristics: • • • • • • • • • <br />
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Portability Permanent availability Transmission efficiency Data management Evidence regulation (removal of fake responses) Cost-benefit relation Extension of therapy session Manipulation Cognitive interface structure<br />
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In the field of psychotherapy, mobile applications provide greater validity and generalizability, since data are collected in the participant’s natural environment as opposed to a laboratory setting. In the specific case of eating disorders, Smyth (2001) states that a combination of event contingent and random signal recording is considered to be ideal. An additional benefit offered by PDAs is the programmable “time stamping” of entries and an easier management of both data and the amount of data that can be collected. (Norton 2003) Newman (2004) also indicates that PDAs can be programmed to remind patients to practice specific therapeutic techniques in natural settings. Regarding research, Yon et al. (2007) point out that the programmability of handheld devices allows for a varied sampling about dietary habits when studying binge antecedents. Moreover, PDAs are not only a mean to collect behavior data among patients, but they can also be used to deliver treatment. According to Cook Myers et al. (2003), “It seems that cognitive-behavioral techniques can be translated and applied to this technology (PDA), encouraging patients to focus more attention on treatment goals and work through problems on their own.” Anderson et al. (2004) indicate that one of the advantages of PDAs in relation to Cognitive Behavioral Treatments (CBT) is that they may facilitate therapy generalization beyond<br />
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sessions —a fundamental goal of CBT. Individuals may refer to the computer in-between therapeutic sessions for assistance while making homework, perhaps increasing the likelihood that the homework is done correctly and that it is done at all. Since palmtops (PDAs) can review homework instructions by themselves, therapy time can focus on the patient’s idiosyncratic needs, on possible crises, and on rapport building.<br />
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MOBILE LEARNING, PERFORMANCE SUPPORT AND INFORMAL LEARNING According to Motiwalla (2005), “m-learning intersects mobile computing with e-learning, it combines individualized (or personal) learning with anytime and anywhere learning... despite the tremendous growth and potential of wireless phones and handheld devices like Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) or Smart Phones which hybrid mobile and handheld devices into one device and networks, wireless e-learning and mobile learning (m-learning) are still in their infancy and in an embryonic stage... The key features of using a wireless and handheld devices for e-learning are its personalization capability and extended reach; this has potentially attracted more and more learners, especially adult learners, for whom the work-life balance is critical.” Mobile learning does not replace the classroom or distance learning. However, if their key features are well understood, mobile devices can be used as tools to enhance the learning process: “In fact, mobile learning offers another way to deliver content and to embed learning into daily life. The learning materials need to be developed in small, consumable bytes of format, which can be delivered through wireless network.” (Yu-Liang 2005) To have learning embedded into daily life allows users to improve their work performance. To describe this phenomenon, the Advanced Distributed Learning ADL –an organization that defines specifications<br />
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to enable the interoperability, accessibility and reusability of Web-based learning contents– created the concept of “Performance Aiding”, also known as “Performance Support”. Performance Aiding is an approach used to support the improvement of user-centered equipment design, the replacement of human roles through automation, and the development of new technology for work performance such as personal digital assistants, tablet PCs, wearable PCs, wireless networks, etc. In relation to productivity-related performance, the learning Guild-Community Networking Resources define mobile learning as “Any activity that allows individuals to be more productive when consuming, interacting with, or creating information, mediated through a compact digital portable device that the individual carries on a regular basis, has reliable connectivity, and fits in a pocket or purse.” (Retrieved October 24, 2008, from http://www.eLearningGuild.com) The concepts of “performance aiding” and “being productive” are related to mobile learning and to a kind of learning known as “informal learning”, defined by Livingstone (2001) as “any activity involving the pursuit of understanding, knowledge or skill which occurs without the presence of externally imposed curricular criteria. Informal learning may occur in any context outside the pre-established curricula of educative institutions.” (Retrieved November 29, 2008<br />
<br />
from http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/depts/sese/ csew/nall/res/21adultsifnormallearning.htm, last seen) in Network on new Approaches to Lifelong Learning [NALL]) In the field of mobile learning, Eraut (2000) (quoted by Naismith et al. 2004) classifies informal learning as “activities along a continuum of the learner’s intent, with former activities representing deliberate learning and latter activities representing implicit learning. Activities in the middle of the continuum are described as reactive learning, which occurs in response to changing circumstances”. The main goal of this kind of learning is that users learn to perform either a new task or an old task in a different, more efficient way. Informal learning is one of many theoretical approaches to mobile learning, however, “at the present time […] the models for using and developing mobile applications for learning are somewhat lacking”, NESTA Futurelab (http:// www.futurelab.org.uk, last seen December 2004). A literary review on mobile technologies and learning reveals six broad theory-based activity categories to provide a loose theoretical background: The theoretical proposal must be complemented from an educational point of view. In this sense, we can mention the properties of a number of mobile devices identified by Klopfer, Squire,<br />
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Table 1. An activity-based categorization of mobile technologies and learning (Naismith et al 2004) €€€€€€€€€€Theme<br />
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€€€€€€€€€€Key Theorists<br />
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€€€€€€€€€€Activities<br />
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Behaviorist learning<br />
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Skinner, Pavlov<br />
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drill and feedback<br />
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Constructivist learning<br />
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Piaget,Bruner, Papert<br />
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participatory simulations<br />
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Situated learning<br />
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Lave, Brown<br />
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problem and case-based learning context awareness<br />
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Collaborative learning<br />
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Vygotsky<br />
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mobile computer-supported collaborative learning (MCSCL)<br />
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Informal and lifelong learning<br />
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Eraut<br />
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supporting intentional and accidental learning episodes<br />
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Learning and teaching support<br />
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n/a<br />
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personal organization support for administrative duties<br />
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Jenkis (2002) –as quoted by Naismith et al. (2004)– as potentially educational tools: 1. Portability: mobile devices can be taken to different places or moved around within one place thanks to their small size and weight. 2. Social interactivity: data exchange and collaboration with other learners can happen face to face. 3. Context sensitivity: mobile devices can both gather and respond to real or simulated data unique to a specific location, environment and time. 4. Connectivity: a shared network can be created by connecting mobile devices to a common network. 5. Individuality: Scaffolding for difficult activities can be customized for individual learners.<br />
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MOBILE LEARNING CHALLENGES Salomon (1990), as quoted by Motiwalla (2005), states that ICT research and integration in education has proved to be effective “only when developers understand the strengths and weaknesses of the technology and integrate technology into appropriate pedagogical practices”. The existing literature in the field of mobile learning reinforces Figure 2. A m-learning framework (Motiwalla 2005)<br />
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this conclusion: the adaptation of learning (theories, objectives, contents, student profiles) to the technological characteristics offered by mobile devices (screen size, connectivity, convergence of multiplatform solutions, data management) will determine their efficiency. Yu-Liang (2005) describes three main challenges in this direction: the first one derives from the concept of adaptative learning, “where the instructional strategies and learning content should be designed to adapt to the learner’s profile and personal needs. Since the wireless network enables learners to be engaged into the learning anytime anywhere. The learner may pursue learning at any location, where learners hold various moods and motivations”. The second challenge is “the limited text display that supports the learning. An exploration of methods needs to be done; hence, the communication technology can support the learning content in guiding learners to be involved in an active learning process without the support of rich or multiple external representations for providing the cognitive functions of complement, constrain, and construct”. The third challenge is related “to the characteristics of instant communication in mobile network. For the issue of cooperative learning over the Internet, the web learning not only supports better academic interaction among learning peers, but also provides individual learners with higher satisfaction. The related factors are the location and response time. Location means<br />
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where the learners use their computers to access the web learning”. There is still a fourth challenge of mobile learning, the one that completes the scene, is described by Quinn (Quinn, 2004) as “crossplatform solutions, meaning all learners have access to all materials independent of particular system preferences”.<br />
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Technological Framework Allen (2003) states that “there is no definite explanation about how the applications of new mobile technologies emerge in commercial contexts […] the new forms of technological emergence are generated not only by technological progress, but also by how they are applied. More than technological development, it is the research of new applications that seems to be the most important dynamizer in the field of emerging technologies”. Research in the field of sociology of technology suggests that the evolution of applications must be studied as a social interaction process. A technological change is created when all actors implied in social interactions use common definitions of technological problems and solutions. As a result, technology producers develop, maintain, and offer particular forms of technology that accurately respond to those characteristics. Based on sociology of technology, a socio-technical perspective of information technology holds that the emergence of new technologies implies an attempt to create a common definition that will offer a meaning to sustain a social interaction in development, acquisition, and use. The common definition of a new technology guarantees that everybody knows what a technology is good for, which goals it pursues, and what its most desirable characteristics are. This is known as a technological framework.<br />
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Recommendations for Case of Use Designing As described above, Psychotherapy is an interactive communication process where the ICTs are tools used to enhance or facilitate particular stages of the process. E-therapy is the field that relates ICTs to psychotherapy and self-help therapy is a kind of e-therapy where psychotherapy is selfadministered by patients individually or in groups and with or without a therapist’s guidance. The integration of mobile applications can be done in this kind of therapy in patient’s natural environment to provide more valid and generalizable information than self-reports. They also represent a therapeutic aid in-between sessions and offer a timely data gathering method which avoids retrospective recall. In self-help therapy as start point three main considerations should be done to define the mobile application characteristics. First, the “case of use” can be identified and isolated from the main components of e-therapy afore mentioned: • • • <br />
<br />
• <br />
<br />
• <br />
<br />
The roles within therapy: patients or patients groups The types of interaction: self-help therapy or self-help therapy group The communication methods or tools: sms, mobile applications, video-call, mobile internet service The type of information: general information, support or advice or delivered treatment The synchronicity of interaction: synchronous or asynchronous<br />
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Second, in reference to the psychoterapy goal activity the models of mobile learning can be explored: • <br />
<br />
Situated learning: Problem and casebased learning in self-help therapy<br />
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• <br />
<br />
• <br />
<br />
• <br />
<br />
Collaborative learning: Mobile computer-supported collaborative learning (MCSCL) in the cases of self-help therapy group Informal and lifelong learning: Supporting intentional and accidental learning episodes in both cases self-help therapy and self-help therapy group Learning and teaching support: Personal organization support for administrative duties in self-help therapy<br />
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Third, in reference of mobile devices characteristics: • <br />
<br />
• • • <br />
<br />
Mobile display: Content and guidelines design in reference to mobile device available Mobile real time communication: Support cooperative learning practices Cross platform solution: Access to the same content anywhere in any device Mobile adaptative learning: Data base manage and patient data storage for the adaptation of content in relation to patients needs and therapy process.<br />
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CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKS The use of information and communication technologies or ICTs in the education field encloses changes and new challenges to the teachinglearning process. Traditional methods and web distance methods have particular strengths and weaknesses that have led to the emergence of a new kind of educational methodology known as Blended Learning (BL). In some cases, BL practices are defined as the combination of traditional teaching-learning methodologies supported with ICT technologies (Whitelock, 2003). In other cases, BL is defined as the pedagogical selection of techniques with or with out technology influence (Driscoll, 2002). As in the education field, in the psychotherapeutic<br />
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field the traditional techniques are not modified for ICT intervention, but for any future work the participation of expert therapists are necessary, since their experience will enhance the development of blended therapeutic practices. Following the considerations presented in the previous section, many cases of mobile integration can de defined and developed, but in any case the future research directions relay in the intersection of technology with therapeutic and learning impact. The mobile applications provide useful diagnostic information, support patient’s well-being evaluation and therapy adjustment. The impact of the use of technology in patient’s progress can be monitored also, because the use of mobile application to support therapy activities provides autonomy and privacy to the user, which means that can concentrate more to reach his goals. The key factors of mobile applications are their adaptation capability and their cross-platform solution. The adaptation capability means the personalization offered by modifying information libraries and graphics based on the analysis of patient’s behavior patterns. The cross platform solution means that all the patients will use the same application independently of particular system preferences or mobile device model. The main challenge in using mobile applications as tools in psychotherapy activities is the understanding of strengths and weaknesses of the mobile technology–hardware and software– in order to adapt them into appropriate therapy and learning process practices. In other words, a technological framework should be created to support this new area of development. In reference to the technological features related with the mobile therapy field, the next step for the development of mobile applications is the exploration of adaptive user interfaces, which means the use of algorithms that support the inference of user actions in the generation of behavior patterns that help the user behavior modeling and allow an suitable interaction design.<br />
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Finally, the integration of ICTs as supporting tools in the therapeutic process has not been studied in depth. This offers an interesting and vast field for ICT research. Regarding mobile applications as support tools, it can be said that they are a personal and adaptable option not only as therapeutic tools, but even as aids for learning and performance.<br />
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REFERENCES Allen, J. P. (2003). The Evolution of New Mobile Applications: A Sociotechnical Perspective. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 8(1), 23–26. Anderson, G., & Kaldo, V. (2004). Internetbased cognitive behavioral therapy for tinnitus. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 60(2), 171–178. doi:10.1002/jclp.10243 Barak, A. (2007). Emotional support and suicide prevention through the Internet: A field project report. Computers in Human Behavior, 23(2), 971–984. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2005.08.001 Botella, C., Banos, R. M., Villa, H., Perpina, C., & Garcia-Palacios, A. (2000). Telepsychology: Public speaking fear treatment on the Internet. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 3, 959–968. doi:10.1089/109493100452228 Castelnuovo, G., & Gaggioli, A. (2003). From psychotherapy to e-therapy: The Integration of Traditional Techniques and New Communication Tools in Clinical Settings. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 6(4), 375–882. doi:10.1089/109493103322278754 Castelnuovo, G., Gaggioli, A., Mantovani, F., & Riva, G. (2003). New and old tools in psychotherapy: The use of technology for the integration of traditional clinical treatments. Psychotherapy (Chicago, Ill.), 40(1-2), 33–44. doi:10.1037/00333204.40.1-2.33<br />
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Cook Myers, T., Swan-Kremeier, L., Wonderlich, S., Lancaster, K., & Mitchell, J. E. (2004). The use of alternative delivery systems and new technologies in the treatment of patients with eating disorders. The International Journal of Eating Disorders, 36(2), 123–143. doi:10.1002/eat.20032 Driscoll, M. (2002) Blended Learning: Let’s get beyond the hype. E-learning Retrieved March 2, 2007, from http://www.elearningmag.com/elearning/ article/articleDetail.jsp?id=11755 Eysenbach, G. (2001) What is e-health? Journal of Medical Internet Research, 3(2), e20. Retrieved September 25,2008, from http://www.jmir. org/2001/2/e20 Finn, J. (2002). MSW student perceptions of the efficacy and ethics of Internet-based therapy. Journal of Social Work Education, 38(3), 403–419. Griffiths, M., & Cooper, G. (2003). Online therapy: implications for gamblers and clinicians. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 31(1), 113–135. doi:10.1080/0306988031000086206 Grohol John, M. (2001) Best practices of eTherapy. PsychCentral Learn Share and Grow, Retrieved September 25,2008 from http://psychcentral.com/ best/best5.htm Heinlen, K., Welfel, E., & Richmond, E. (2003). The nature, scope, and ethics of psychologists e-therapy web sites: What consumers find when surfing the Web. Psychotherapy (Chicago, Ill.), 40(1-2), 112–124. doi:10.1037/0033-3204.40.1-2.112 Kanani, K., & Regehr, C. (2003). Clinical, ethical and legal issues in e-therapy, Families in Society. Families in Society, 84(2), 155–162. Klopfer, E., Squire, K., & Jenkins, H. (2002). Environmental Detectives: PDAs as a window into a virtual simulated world. Proc. IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education. Vaxjo, Sweden:IEEE Computer Society, 95-98<br />
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Livingstone, D. W. (2001) Adults informal learning Definitions, Findings, Gaps and Future Research, The research network on new approaches to lifelong learning, Nall Working Paper 21-2001 Retrieved November 29, 2008 from http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/depts/sese/csew/nall/ res/21adultsifnormallearning.htm Manhal-Baugus, M.E-therapy: Practical, ethical and legal issues. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 4(5), 551–563. doi:10.1089/109493101753235142 Motiwalla, L. F. (2005). Mobile learning: A framework and evaluation. Computers & Education, 49, 581–596. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2005.10.011 Naismith, L., Lonsdale, P., Vavoula, G., & Sharples, M. (2004) Literature Review in Mobile Technologies and Learning. Report 11. Nesta Future Lab. University of Birmingham. Retrieved from http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/ publications-reports-articles/literature-reviews/ Literature-Review203 Newman, G. (2004). Technology in psychotherapy: An introduction. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 60(2), 141–220. doi:10.1002/jclp.10240 Norton, M., Wonderlich, S., Myers, T., Mitchell, J. E., & Crosby, R. D. (2003). The use of palmtop computers in the treatment of bulimia nervosa. European Eating Disorders Review, 11(3), 231–242. doi:10.1002/erv.518 Quinn, C. (2000) mLearning: Mobile, Wireless in your pocket learning, Learning in the New Economy e-Magazine (LiNE Zine), Retrieved August 21, 20009 from http://www.linezine. com/2.1/features/cqmmwiyp.htm Salomon, G. (1990). Studying the. ute and the orchestra: controlled vs. classroom research on computers. International Journal of Educational Research, 14, 521–532. doi:10.1016/08830355(90)90022-Z<br />
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Smyth, J., Wonderlich, S., Crosby, R., Miltenberger, R., Mitchell, J., & Rorty, M. (2001). The use of ecological momentary assessment approaches in eating disorder research. The International Journal of Eating Disorders, 30(1), 83–95. doi:10.1002/eat.1057 The E-learning Guild Community and Resources for E-learning Professionals. Mobile learning. Retrieved October 24, 2008 from http://www. eLearningGuild.com Whitelock, D., & Jelfs, A. (2003). Editorial: Journal of Educational Media Special Issue on Blended Learning. Journal of Educational Media, 28(2-3), 99–100. Yon, B., Johnson, R., Harvey-Berino, J., & Casey, B. (2007). Personal Digital Assisstants are comparable to traditional diaries for dietary self-monitoring during weight loss program. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 30(2), 165–175. doi:10.1007/s10865-006-9092-1 Yu-Liang Ting, R. (2005) Mobile learning: current trend and futures challenges, Advanced Learning Technologies 2005 ICALT 2005. Fifth IEEE International Conference on. 603-607.<br />
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Mobile Learning: Individualized e-learning delivery through a mobile device. Mobile Therapy: Personal provision of etherapy through a mobile device. Mobile Applications: Software designed for mobile devices. Performance Support: Aid improvement for user´s activities. Telehealth: The use of Information and Communication Technologies to provide remote access to health information and services as diagnostic, treatment, information dissemination and education.<br />
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Mobile Applications as Mobile Learning and Performance Support Tools in Psychotherapy Activities<br />
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E-Health: An emerging field where health services and information are delivered or enhanced through the ICTs included Internet. E-Therapy: Mental health services partial or total support by Information and Communication Technologies.<br />
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Self-Help Therapy: Personal psychotherapy over Internet with or not professional intervention.<br />
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Chapter 19<br />
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CampusLocator:<br />
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A Mobile Location-Based Service for Learning Resources Hassan Karimi University of Pittsburgh, USA Mahsa Ghafourian University of Pittsburgh, USA<br />
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ABSTRACT Location-based services (LBSs) are impacting different aspects of human’s life. To date, different LBSs have been emerged, each supporting a specific application or service. While some LBSs have aimed at addressing the needs of general populations, such as navigation systems, others have been focused on addressing the needs of specific populations, including kids, youths, elderly, and people with special needs. In recent years, interest in taking a LBS approach in education and learning has grown. The main purpose of such educational LBSs is facilitating a means for learners to be more efficient and effective in their learning activities using their location as the underlying information in decision making. In this chapter, we present a novel LBS, called CampusLocator, whose main goal is to assist students in locating and accessing learning resources including libraries, seminars, and tutorials that are available on a campus.<br />
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1. INTRODUCTION Location-based services (LBSs) is defined as “computer applications delivering information based upon the location” (Steiniger, Neun, & EdDOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch019<br />
<br />
wardes, 2009). To date, various LBSs have been designed for different applications and services. Examples of such LBS applications/services include navigation and locating points of interests (POIs) (Ghafourian & Karimi, 2009; Karimi & Ghafourian, May 2009; Raper, Gartner, Karimi, &<br />
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Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.<br />
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CampusLocator<br />
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Rizos, June 2007), tracking, health (LaRue, Mitchell, Karimi, Kasemsuppakorn, & Roongpiboonsopit, 2009), and emergency services (Schiller & Voisard, 2004), social networking (Ghafourian, Karimi, & Roosmalen, 2009; Karimi, Zimmerman, Ozcelik, & Roongpiboonsopit, 2009), and gaming (Kolodziej & Hjelm, 2006). While LBSs have permeated in several applications/services, their presence in education and learning applications/services is limited to few research projects. In this chapter, we focus on mobile locationbased learning as an emerging LBS application. Mobile learning refers to “making learning resource available anywhere and at anytime” (Benford, 2005). This implies that mobile locationbased learning makes learning resources available based on location of the learner. Learning resources could be libraries, bookstores, and seminars and the users of mobile location-based learning systems are students. Students typically spend a lot of time surfing different websites of a university’s schools, libraries, among others, to find learning resources of their interest and need. For instance, a student wishing to attend seminars relevant to his/her research topic typically searches several schools’ websites or a student wishing to find a book relevant to his/her course in a nearby library typically searches several libraries’ websites. Mobile location-based learning could play a major role in student’s activities on a university’s campus assisting them in finding learning resources, such as libraries, computing labs, schools, and events within the campus. In this chapter, we present CampusLocator, a LBS which provides students of a university with location-based information of a variety of learning resources based on their preferences and needs. The main objectives of CampusLocator are to allow students to request location information on learning resources available on a campus, and directions suitable to the mode of travel (e.g., walking or driving) to reach them; to recommend learning resources; to remind students about learning resources; and to allow contact with other<br />
<br />
students through a social network for requesting, reminding, and recommending learning resources. The structure of the chapter is as follows. In Section 2, the background of location-based learning is presented. In Sections 3, the concepts of CampusLocator, through an ontology, are presented. In Section 4, CampusLocator’s architecture and components are presented. Section 5 discusses the characteristics of CampusLocator including features, i.e., request, remind, recommend, and social networking, technologies, data, and functions. In Sections 6 and 7, a CampusLocator prototype and a strategy to evaluate it are discussed. Finally, Section 8 presents summary and future research.<br />
<br />
2. BACKGROUND Mobile location-based learning is a recent application of LBS. Currently there are few research projects that are focused on developing LBSs with education purposes. In this section, an overview of such location-based education and learning projects is provided. (Griswold, et al., 2002) developed ActiveCampus, a guide service for a university campus. The objective of ActiveCampus is to provide learners with location-based information on campus and locating nearby friends. ActiveCampus provides students with location-specific links to web pages, replies to students’ inquiries, and allows annotation where students can leave comments for specific locations. ActiveCampus also enables students to find nearby friends, school buildings, labs, and interesting events. The advantages of ActiveCampus are simplicity, sustainability, and adaptability to different user interfaces. However, ActiveCampus is limited in terms of scalability and local control in that it does not explore information on servers of different campus units. (Facer, et al., 2004) developed Savannah, a location-based game system with learning as its main purpose. The objective of the game is<br />
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to explore the terrain of the Savannah with the collaboration of the group to find resources for lions to be survived. Savannah provides a learning environment where children can learn about the lion behavior in the African Savannah. The learning process is through playing game in a group of six children. The game consists of two domains of activities. In the first domain, the children are provided by Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) with which they can ‘see’, ‘hear’, and ‘smell’ the virtual world of Savannah. The second domain, ‘Den’, is an indoor environment where children can reflect their performance of the played game. Savannah is a client-server system where the client side is a mobile device equipped with GPS, wireless networking, full color screen, and sound system. The server is a game server which uses received information from the client to determine the game status and the children/lions experience. The main advantage of Savannah project is leveraging location-based games for learning purposes. Since youths are usually interested in games, the idea of using location-based gaming is useful when learners are children or teenagers and when learning contents depend on geographical areas. Examples of such contents are geography, geology, biology, and history. (Zhou & Rechert, 2008) introduced the process required for personalization of location-based ELearning systems. They developed a prototype which provides students majoring in biology with biological information in a botanical garden. Location-based E-Learning systems provide learning contents based upon learners’ current location (Zhou & Rechert, 2008). As learners pass through areas annotated by learning contents, such as historical information of a building, relevant information is presented on learners’ mobile devices. Location-based E-Learning systems can also be used for other applications such as a tourist guide. The first step in personalizing location-based E-Learning is modeling learning context. To this end, comprehensive information about learning context, including location, needs to be collected.<br />
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The purpose of modeling learning context is to provide learners with the most relevant learning contents. One drawback of this research is that no measurement and evaluation for personalization process is provided. (Ruiz & Wheeler, 2004) presented an educational paradigm called Just-In-Location Learning (JILL). The goal of JILL is to provide learners with knowledge relevant to their mobile location. Using the JILL paradigm, learners are able to control which location information they want to receive. To develop systems based on the JILL paradigm, reorganization of learning contents into a geospatial semantic web is required. Example applications of JILL includes statistics, where students would be informed of statistical information such as demographics and incident of crime in a geographic area, weather, where students would be notified on historical weather patterns and forecasts, ecosystems, where students can find information about the plants and animals of a region, health, where students would be alerted of health hazards and dangerous smog patterns of a geographic area, and historic, where historical information of geographic areas would be presented to the student. (Schneider, Arnoldy, & Mangerich, 2007) presented MOVII, a location-based e-learning system developed through a web service interface, for tourism in the German city of Trier, which has many historic attractions for tourists. The project was based on the premise that the experience of walking through such a city could be enhanced by receiving location sensitive information via a mobile device. Using MOVII, tourists would receive information on historical buildings and areas as the pass by them. Of all the above research projects, ActiveCampus has more similarities with CampusLocator. However, unlike ActiveCampus, CampusLocator can provide personalized information on learning resources via a portal that provides access to both university web pages and friends’ recommendations posted in a social networking framework.<br />
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3. ONTOLOGY In this chapter, we present CampusLocator, a mobile location-based system which assists students of a university with finding and locating learning resources available within its campus. Such resources include libraries, computing labs, bookstores, events (e.g., seminars/talks, short courses/trainings, and tutorials/recitations), and other students (students who provide information on learning resources through a social network are also considered as learning resources). The main goal of CampusLocator is to provide an environment where students can easily locate and access learning resources through requests, recommendations, and reminders.<br />
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Figure 1 shows an ontology for CampusLocator with the main concepts and the relationships among them. The two main concepts in CampusLocator, as illustrated in the ontology, are “student” and “learning resources”. Student is the potential user who benefits from location-based services supported by CampusLocator. A student attends a school in a university and enrolls in one or several course(s). Each course is offered in a semester, instructed by an instructor, has a title/number, reading materials, assigned textbook, exam schedule, homework/projects with specific deadlines, scheduled activities, lab work, and may require the access to and use of a software. Each student has a profile which includes<br />
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Figure 1.<br />
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information such as address, age, sex, program of study, and some settings including reminders and automatic recommendations. Students can select their friends and classmates in the social network to share location-based information on learning resources. Such information on learning resources includes the location and hours of a bookstore which has a sale on books with specific topics or address of a quiet study lounge in a nearby school. Students can also include their preferences related to the learning resources and routes to reach them. Example preferences are topics of interest for learning resources and shortest or fastest routes for navigation assistance. Learning resources include people (friends, classmates), POIs (computing labs, libraries, bookstores), and events (colloquia, short courses/ trainings, tutorials/recitations). Friends and classmates are considered learning resources as they can share location-based information on learning resources within the social network. Information on computing labs, libraries, bookstores, and other Figure 2.<br />
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POIs include address and hours of operation as well as other information and specifications. For example, computing labs may include information on their computers and equipment such as scanners, printers, and internet access; libraries may include information on the books they hold and the availability of free internet access; and bookstores may include information on the books they carry and the supplies for sale. Events, another learning resource, may include information about location, time, title for colloquia/seminars/talks, short courses, trainings, and tutorials/recitations. Once students’ profiles, preferences, and enrolled courses are entered into CampusLocator, they can interact with the system for adding friends, requesting learning resources, recommending learning resources, setting reminders (e.g., reminder for exam dates/times and locations), and setting to receive automatic recommendations as their current location nears locations of desired learning resources.<br />
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4. ARCHITECTURE AND COMPONENTS CampusLocator is based on a distributed architecture which consists of six components (Figure 2): client, CampusLocator portal, CampusLocatorSN, resources, web mapping service, and complementary positioning service. Client can be either a mobile device, such as smart phone and personal digital assistant (PDA), or a personal computer (PC) connected to CampusLocator through the Internet. CampusLocator portal is the component of CampusLocator available on the server side and used to find and locate learning resources on a university’s web pages, receive requests and recommendations through the social network, and return results. Portals are services that extract information from different resources that can be within a local or wide area network (Townsend, Riz, & Schaffer, March 2004). CampusLocator-SN is the social networking component of CampusLocator, where students can add friends and interact with one another through messaging, recommendation, and request on location-based information on learning resources.<br />
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Web Mapping Services provide several functions such as mapping, panning, zooming, geocoding, overlaying, proximity, and routing/directions. Google Maps is an example web mapping service that can be used in CampusLocator. Complementary positioning service is used to identify the current location based on the IP address, if current location of the user cannot be determined through the GPS receiver of the mobile device. Skyhook is an example complementary positioning service that can be used in CampusLocator. Client (mobile device or PC) can access CampusLocator through a portal. The portal has the appropriate links to all the learning resources where the client can find relevant information such as schools, computing labs, libraries, and CampusLocator-SN. Learning resources and routes to reach them are represented on a map using a third-party web mapping service (such as Google Maps)For personalization purposes, student’s profile, stored in a local database on the client side, is taken into consideration when responding to queries. Recommendations and reminders, once requested or set in the profile, will be sent to the client.<br />
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Table 1. CampusLocator characteristics Features<br />
<br />
Recommendation Reminder Request Social networking<br />
<br />
Technologies Positioning<br />
<br />
Wireless Communication<br />
<br />
Spatial / Decision Analysis<br />
<br />
LBS Platform<br />
<br />
Client Device<br />
<br />
Outdoor: GPS Bluetooth DR Cell-based IP address Indoor: RFID A-GPS Bluetooth Cell-based IP address<br />
<br />
Wi-Fi Cell Bluetooth<br />
<br />
Outdoor: GIS Indoor: CAD<br />
<br />
Android iPhone WHERE<br />
<br />
Nonmobile: PC Mobile: Cellphone Smartphone PDA Laptop<br />
<br />
Data<br />
<br />
Required Functions<br />
<br />
Outdoor: Road Sidewalk Libraries Bookstores Campus buildings Indoor: Hallway Classes Offices Labs People: Student’s profile/preferences Student’s recommendations<br />
<br />
Map matching Proximity Routing Geocoding Social matching<br />
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5. CHARACTERISTICS<br />
<br />
5.1 Features<br />
<br />
Developing CampusLocator with recommendation, request, reminder, and social networking as the main features requires the integration of several technologies (positioning, wireless communication, spatial/decision analysis, LBS platforms, client devices), different types of data types (spatial and non-spatial), and different sets of functions (geocoding, map matching, buffering, routing, overlaying). Table 1 illustrates CampusLocator characteristics from both application and implementation perspective.<br />
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CampusLocator’s features include: allowing students to request for location information on learning resources available on a campus, and, if requested, providing directions suitable to the mode of travel to reach them; recommending learning resources; reminding students about learning resources; and allowing contact with other students through a social network for requesting and recommending learning resources. These features can be summarized as request, recommend, remind, and social networking. To<br />
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Figure 3.<br />
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better understand these features, each is described through a scenario. Request. Students can request for location of learning resources at a university campus by specifying a location, a time, and a route to reach the found learning resources. For personalization, the Quality of Services (QoS) which include student’s preferences, enrolled courses, and location and time of the requested resource are sent along with the query. CampusLocator portal searches for information on the requested learning resource through the university’s websites, such as libraries and bookstores. If such information is not found, it explores CampusLocator-SN to find a recommendation that matches QoS. Once the learning resource is found, CampusLocator portal retrieves the map from a web mapping service, such as Google Maps, to display the learning resource on the map. In case of requesting for navigation assistance, CampusLocator portal forwards the request to a web mapping service, such as Google Maps. Figure 3 shows a high level flowchart for the request feature. Scenario: Sara is a student of the School of information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, which supports students with CampusLocator services. She has enrolled in a course titled Geospatial Information Systems where the next project is due next week. She uses CampusLocator services, as an application on her smart phone, to find and locate tutorials relevant to the project that are scheduled for this week and are nearby the school. There could be two cases. In the first case, CampusLocator finds a relevant tutorial announced in one of the university’s websites which is closest to the school and scheduled in two days from today’s date in the School of Engineering. In the second case, after not finding any tutorial announced on any of the university’s websites, CampusLocator searches the recommendations within the social network and finds a recommendation of one of Sara’s classmates on a talk that matches her request. CampusLocator sends the information on the recommended talk<br />
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Figure 4.<br />
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on a map along with the shortest route from the School of information Sciences to this location to Sara’s smart phone. Recommend. Students can set their preferences to automatically receive recommendations on relevant learning resources. CampusLocator recommends the learning resources that match the student’s preferences based on the current location or other desired locations. Figure 4 shows a high level flowchart for the recommendation feature. Scenario: Sara from the previous scenario sets her profile to receive recommendations on talks/ seminars/tutorials relevant to her course, Geospatial Information Systems. As she is walking on the campus and passes by the School of Com-<br />
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Figure 5.<br />
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puter Science, she receives a message from CampusLocator to notify her of a relevant talk that will starts in fifteen minutes. Remind. Students can set to receive reminders on location, date, and time of specific events, office hours of the instructors, exam days and time, among other resources. CampusLocator can send reminders based on preferences. For instance, it can remind a student of the location and time of the final exam for each of their courses or of the office hours of the instructor. A student can also request to be reminded of the location and time of a specified seminar or lecture that is of his/ her interest.<br />
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Figure 5 displays a high level flowchart for the reminder feature. Scenario: Sara sets her profile to receive reminders on exams’ dates, times, and locations. On her exam day, CampusLocator sends her a message reminding her of the exam’s time and location. CampusLocator checks the weather and traffic on the day/time of the exam in order to provide Sara with the fastest route from her house to the building where the exam is scheduled and to estimate the departure time. Social Networking. CampusLocator allows students to share location information on learning resources with other members (classmates, friends) through a social network. CampusLocator facilitates students to interact with one another and recommend learning resources of their interest available on the campus as well as sending requests for information on specific learning resources from peers. Students can recommend a learning resource either by tagging their current location, assuming the current location is a learning resource, or by tagging any learning resource of their interest in any location on the campus. They also can send their requests through messaging. Figure 6 presents a high level flowchart for recommendation and request through CampusLocator-SN. Scenario: Sara finds a book relevant to her course, which is on sale and sold at a bookstore nearby the school. She recommends the book to her classmates by tagging the location of the bookstore on the map and annotating it by information about the book and the sale dates.<br />
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5.2 Technologies The major technologies in CampusLocator are positioning, communication, spatial/decision analysis, platform, and client device. Positioning technologies can be grouped into those that can operate in outdoors and those operate in indoors. For outdoors, there are several technologies such as Global Positioning System<br />
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Figure 6.<br />
<br />
(GPS), Bluetooth, dead reckoning, cell-based, and IP address. Radio-frequency identification (RFID), assisted GPS (A-GPS), Bluetooth, cellbased, and IP address are examples of indoor positioning technologies. Wireless communication technologies facilitate the interaction between the different components of CampusLocator, such as client and server(s). Examples of communication technologies are Wi-Fi, cell, and Bluetooth. Spatial/Decision analysis technologies facilitate checking “locations”, “attributes”, and “relationships of features” in spatial data using several techniques to address spatial queries. Typically, spatial/decision analysis consists of three components, database, statistical and graphical data analysis, and spatial visualization tools (Lo & Yeung, 2007). Spatial/Decision analysis is available in outdoor and indoor types. Geographic information system (GIS) which is a system that captures, stores, retrieves, analyzes, and displays geographical information (Cowen, 1988) is used for outdoors. Computer-Aid Design (CAD) which is a system for drawing and updating maps (Curry, 2004) is used for indoors.<br />
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LBS Platforms are those that facilitate developing location-based services by providing location-based functions and mapping services. The most common LBS platforms are WHERE, Android and iPhone. WHERE is an open-source LBS platform which supports developers with several programming languages such as PHP, Cold Fusion, and Ruby. However, WHERE has some drawbacks including its slow performance and its limited functionalities (only navigation and POI finder). Android is an open-source platform for developing location-based applications (Meier, 2009), which can be installed and used through different platforms, i.e., Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux (i386) (“Android Documentation,” 2009). iPhone, which is not an open-source platform allows connection to and utilization of several third party location-based systems vendors such as Google Maps, Yahoo Map, and Skyhook Wireless (Sadun, 2009b). Client devices consist of mobile and non-mobile devices. Examples of mobile devices include smart phone, cell phone, PDAs, and laptops, and examples of non-mobile devices is PC.<br />
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5.3 Data Several different datasets are required for CampusLocator. These data are typically in two types, spatial and non-spatial data. Examples of spatial data that are required for LBSs in outdoors include roads and sidewalk segments and shape and geographic coordinates of starting and ending points (geometry) and geographic position of libraries, bookstores, and campus buildings, and spatial data that are required for LBS in indoors are hallways and locations of classes, offices, and labs within the building. Examples of non-spatial data include students’ profile/preferences and students’ recommendations.<br />
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5.4 Functions Developing CampusLocator requires several such functions as geocoding, map matching, buffering, proximity, routing, and social matching. These functions can either be used from the current navigation services, such as Google Map APIs or be developed. Geocoding is “the conversion of analog maps into computer-readable form” (Clarke, 2003). For instance, when Sara in the scenario requests for the location of a library, CampusLocator searches for the library’s address and then geocodes the address to display it on the map. This requires online geocoding services (e.g., Roongpiboonsopit & Karimi, 2009a; Roongpiboonsopit & Karimi 2009b). Map matching is the process of finding the road/ sidewalk segment (in outdoor) or hallway/corridor segment (in indoor) on which the student is, once his/her position through GPS or the complementary positioning service is determined. In Sara’s scenario, as she was walking on a sidewalk, her position points were calculated by GPS and were matched to the sidewalk segment. This requires map matching algorithms that can match raw GPS data to sidewalk segments (e.g., Ren & Karimi, 2009a, 2009b).<br />
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Proximity determines the locations of given objects (e.g., libraries) within a specified distance (as a radius) from the student’s location. For example, in Sara’s scenario, when she requests for computing labs within 5 miles of her current location, the founded computing labs (if there is any) are displayed on the map. This requires the proximity function to find the computing labs in the proximity of 5 miles. Routing is the process of computing a route between a given pair of origin and destination based on one or more criteria, such as shortest distance, fastest time, less number of intersections, and/or toll free. In Sara’s scenario, when the computing lab is found, she requests for the shortest distance route to reach to it. Social matching provides students with most optimal results, i.e., responses that closely match QoSs (Ghafourian, et al., 2009). To find an appropriate recommendation in the social network, CampusLocator must check to see whether the recommendation matches the requested QoSs. In the Sara’s scenario, when she applies to receive location of a bookstore that sells her needed book, since no answer to her query is found in the university web pages, a recommendation from the social network that matches the QoS is returned to her.<br />
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6. PROTOTYPE We have developed a prototype of CampusLocator in the Geoinformatics Laboratory of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh to demonstrate its features and capabilities. The focus of the prototype is providing students with information on learning resources through social networking. The CampusLocator prototype enables students to share their location experiences and recommendations with one another and benefit from their peers’ recommendations. In the following, a brief overview of the prototype is presented. For detailed information on the prototype refer to (Karimi, et al., 2009).<br />
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The architecture of the prototype includes four main components: client, web server, CampusLocator database, and web mapping service. The prototype was developed based on the Apache web server using the PHP programming language. Google Maps APIs were used as the Web Mapping Service which is an open-source service and defines a set of JavaScript and methods to enable developers to put maps on their applications (Gibson & Erle, January, 2006). Google Maps APIs support several functions such as displaying location of resources and members on a map, panning, zooming, geotagging, and recommending routes and areas interactively on the map. MySQL was used as the main database system in the prototype and includes social networking data to store members and recommendations. The client can be non-mobile or mobile. Non-mobile clients are available through any platform that can access the Internet via a web browser. In order to choose a suitable platform for mobile client, we analyzed the capabilities and limitations of two prevalent platforms, Android and iPhone. Android is an open-source platform for developing location-based applications (Meier, 2009) which can be installed and used through different platforms, i.e., Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux (i386) (“Android Documentation,” 2009). Android is a multi-task platform that enables several applications to run simultaneously (Miller, 2009). iPhone, on the other hand, has been emerged in the past couple of years and allows connection to and utilization of third party location-based systems vendors. Examples of third party vendors that iPhone can connect and utilize are Google Maps, Yahoo Map, and Skyhook Wireless (Sadun, 2009a). Despite the advantages of iPhone, such as supporting more than one programming languages and enabling access to several external geospatial resources, it suffers from some limitations. Of such shortcomings, non-interoperability and high expenses for both developers and users are worth mentioning. We selected Android as the platform to develop CampusLocator for mobile client.<br />
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For clients that do not own GPS, their current location can be determined by using IP address or strength of Wi-Fi signals from known wireless networks through the Skyhook service. The CampusLocator prototype enables students to add friends and send/receive messages and to request and recommend learning resources. Students can send private messages to their friends, recommend POIs, including bookstores, libraries, and school buildings, recommend driving, biking, and walking routes between pairs of origin and destination locations, request for routes between a pair of origin and destination, and request POIs within a neighborhood. However, it lacks the capability of searching through university web pages for finding learning resources. For recommendation on a POI, e.g., a library, students can geotag (by placing a marker on the map), annotate the POI, and post comments and rate their recommendations. Recommendation on routes between pairs of origin and destination are possible by marking the routes on the map, annotating them by specifying types, i.e., walking, driving, or bus routes, and by adding recommendation rate and comments. Recommendation on areas of interests, such as parking lots, is possible by marking them on the map.<br />
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7. EVALUATION STRATEGY We have analyzes the parameters that need to be used for evaluating the usability of CampusLocator and summarized them in Table 2. The learning resources that are considered for the testing are categorized into libraries, computer labs, bookstores, and events. For each learning resources, several parameters, their data type (static or dynamic), and the source of the data are considered for testing. To evaluate the usability of social network component of CampusLocator, we have designed a test in which the participants are expected to request and recommend three learning resources,<br />
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Table 2. Testing Parameters for CampusLocator Testing Parameters<br />
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Learning Resources Libraries<br />
<br />
Computer Labs<br />
<br />
Bookstore<br />
<br />
Events<br />
<br />
Source of data<br />
<br />
Location<br />
<br />
S<br />
<br />
Website of the university<br />
<br />
Hours<br />
<br />
S<br />
<br />
Website of the university<br />
<br />
Available books<br />
<br />
D<br />
<br />
Website of the university<br />
<br />
Internet access<br />
<br />
S<br />
<br />
Ask from the front desk<br />
<br />
Available seats for studying<br />
<br />
S<br />
<br />
Ask from the front desk<br />
<br />
Events<br />
<br />
D<br />
<br />
Website of the university<br />
<br />
Location<br />
<br />
S<br />
<br />
Website of the university<br />
<br />
Hours<br />
<br />
S<br />
<br />
Website of the university<br />
<br />
Number of computers<br />
<br />
S<br />
<br />
Website of the university<br />
<br />
Type of computers<br />
<br />
S<br />
<br />
Website of the university<br />
<br />
Available software and tools<br />
<br />
D<br />
<br />
Ask from the front desk<br />
<br />
Available hardware<br />
<br />
S<br />
<br />
Website of the university<br />
<br />
Number and types of the printers<br />
<br />
S<br />
<br />
Website of the university<br />
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Number and types of the scanners<br />
<br />
S<br />
<br />
Website of the university<br />
<br />
Location<br />
<br />
S<br />
<br />
Website of the university<br />
<br />
Hours<br />
<br />
S<br />
<br />
Website of the university<br />
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Available books<br />
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D<br />
<br />
Website of the university<br />
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Type (Colloquia/seminar/talks/tutorial/etc.)<br />
<br />
D<br />
<br />
Website of the university (book center webpage), Website of each school<br />
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Title<br />
<br />
D<br />
<br />
Website of the university (book center webpage), Website of each school<br />
<br />
Presenter<br />
<br />
D<br />
<br />
Website of the university (book center webpage), Website of each school<br />
<br />
Location<br />
<br />
D<br />
<br />
Website of the university (book center webpage), Website of each school<br />
<br />
Date<br />
<br />
D<br />
<br />
Website of the university (book center webpage), Website of each school<br />
<br />
Time<br />
<br />
D<br />
<br />
Website of the university (book center webpage), Website of each school<br />
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as POIs, from each of the following four categories: library, bookstore, computing lab, and event. Participants are students in the Geospatial Information Systems course in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh and researchers in the Geoinformatics laboratory. Participants are both graduate and undergraduate<br />
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Static(S) / Dynamic(D) Data<br />
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students with different backgrounds and interests. After using CampusLocator, participants will fill out a questionnaire in which questions are divided into six categories, student’s background information, setting profile, map manipulation, messaging, searching, and overall satisfactory. A score between 1 and 10 is given to each answer.<br />
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Questions on student’s background include familiarity with city of Pittsburgh and the period of time they have lives in the area. Questions pertained to managing profile contain ease of ease in creating new accounts, logging into the system, adding and removing friends, and identifying current location. Questions relevant to map manipulation include ease of ease in marking, moving, and deleting POIs, routes, and areas. Questions pertained to messaging include ease of ease in sending/receiving messages, requesting, recommending POIs, routes, and areas to friends. Questions on searching capabilities include ease of use in searching POIs based on a specific category, searching routes with a specific POI as origin or destination, and searching recommended areas. Finally, questions on overall satisfactory contain confidence on and satisfaction with CampusLocator.<br />
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8. SUMMARY AND FUTURE RESEARCH In this chapter, we presented CampusLocator, a location-based application in education. CampusLocator provides students of a university with location information on the learning resources available on its campus, such as libraries, computing labs, and events. The main goal of CampusLocator is to provide an environment where students can easily locate and access learning resources through requests, recommendations, and reminders. CampusLocator’s ontology as presented and the characteristics of CampusLocator in terms of features, technologies, data, and functions were analyzed. CampusLocator’s architecture is based on a web portal (CampusLocator portal) that extracts information on learning resources from the university web site and from the recommendations on the social network. In future research, we will evaluate the usability of CampusLocator based on an initial test plan discussed in section 7. Furthermore, we will<br />
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expand the prototype by including search through various university’s web pages.<br />
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REFERENCES Android Documentation. (2009). The Developer’s Guide Retrieved 4 April 2009, from http://developer.android.com/sdk/1.1_r1/index.html Benford, S. (2005). Future location-based experiences. Retrieved 27 March 2009, from http://www. jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/jisctsw_05_01. pdf Clarke, K. C. (2003). Getting Started with Geographic Information Systems (4 ed.): Prentice Education. Cowen, D. (1988). GIS versus CAD versus DBMS: What Are the Differences? Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, 54(11), 1551–1555. Curry, S. (2004). CAD and GIS: Critical Tools. Retrieved 10 Oct. 2009, from http://images.autodesk. com/apac_grtrchina_main/files/4349824_CriticalTools.pdf Facer, K., Joiner, R., Stanton, D., Reidz, J., Hullz, R., & Kirk, D. (2004). Savannah: mobile gaming and learning? Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 20, 399–409. doi:10.1111/j.13652729.2004.00105.x Ghafourian, M., & Karimi, H. A. (2009). Universal Navigation Concept and Algorithms. Paper presented at the 2009 World Congress on Computer Science and Information Engineering (CSIE 2009). Ghafourian, M., Karimi, H. A., & Roosmalen, L. V. (2009). Universal Navigation Through Social Networking. Paper presented at the HCI International 2009. Gibson, R., & Erle, S. (January, 2006). Google Maps Hacks: O’Reilly Media, Inc.<br />
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Griswold, W., Boyer, R., Brown, S., Truong, T., Bhasket, B., Jay, R., et al. (2002). ActiveCampus - Sustaining Educational Communities through Mobile Technology. San Diego: Technical Report<br />
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Ren, M., & Karimi, H. A. (2009b). A Hidden Markov Model Map Matching Algorithm for Wheelchair Navigation. Journal of Navigation, 62(3), 383–395. doi:10.1017/S0373463309005347<br />
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Karimi, H. A., & Ghafourian, M. (2009, May). Universal Navigation. GIM International, 23, 17–19.<br />
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Roongpiboonsopit, D., & Karimi, H. A. (2009baccepted). Comparing and analyzing online street and rooftop geocoding services. Cartography and Geographic Information Science.<br />
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Karimi, H. A., Zimmerman, B., Ozcelik, A., & Roongpiboonsopit, D. (2009). SoNavNet: A Framework for Social Navigation Networks. Paper presented at the International Workshop on Location Based Social Networks (LBSN’09). Kolodziej, K. W., & Hjelm, J. (2006). Local Positioning Systems LBS Applications and Services. Taylor & Francis. doi:10.1201/9781420005004<br />
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Roongpiboonsopit, D., & Karimi, H. A. (2009a. (in press). Comparative evaluation and analysis of online geocoding services. International Journal of Geographical Information Science. Ruiz, J. V., & Wheeler, S. (2004). JILL (JUSTIN-LOCATION LEARNING). Paper presented at the the IADIS International Conference Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age (CELDA 2004).<br />
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LaRue, E. M., Mitchell, A. M., Karimi, H. A., Kasemsuppakorn, P., & Roongpiboonsopit, D. (2009). Companion: Social Support Networking Technology for Survivors of Suicide. Paper presented at the HEALTHINF.<br />
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Sadun, E. (2009a). The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK. Pearson Education Inc.<br />
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Lo, C. P., & Yeung, A. K. W. (2007). Concepts and Techniques of Geographic Information Systems (2 ed.): Pearson Prentice Hall.<br />
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Sadun, E. (2009b). The iPhone™ Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK. Pearson Education Inc.<br />
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Meier, R. (2009). Professional Android Application Development. Indianapolis, Indiana: Wiley Publishing, Inc.<br />
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Schiller, & Voisard. (2004). Location-Based Services: Elsevier Inc.<br />
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Miller, M. (2009). Clash of the Touch Titans; iPhone 3G 3.0 vs HTC Magic Google Android. Retrieved 04 April 2009, from http://blogs.zdnet. com/cell-phones/?p=1004<br />
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Schneider, G., Arnoldy, P., & Mangerich, T. (2007). A Location Based E-Learning System. Paper presented at the International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST).<br />
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Raper, J., Gartner, G., Karimi, H. A., & Rizos, C. (2007, June). Applications of locationbased services: a selected review. Journal of Location Based Services, 1(2), 89–111. doi:10.1080/17489720701862184<br />
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Steiniger, S., Neun, M., & Edwardes, A. (2009). Foundations of Location Based Services. Retrieved 06/12/2009, from http://www.geo.unizh. ch/publications/cartouche/lbs_lecturenotes_steinigeretal2006.pdf<br />
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Townsend, J. J., Riz, D., & Schaffer, D. (March 2004). Building Portals, Intranets, and Corporate Web Sites Using Microsoft Servers: AddisonWesley Professional.<br />
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Zhou, R., & Rechert, k. (2008). Personalization for Location-Based E-Learning. Paper presented at the the Second International Conference on Next Generation Mobile Applications, Services, and Technologies.<br />
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Location-Based Services (LBSs): prepare location-centric information and deliver information to user’s current location. Geo-positioning sensors, to determine user’s current location, and wireless communications, to deliver information, are the most important components of LBSs. Navigation: is the process of moving from one location to another. Recommender: is any system that provides recommendation based upon user’s preferences.<br />
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Reminder: is a system that reminds user of specific tasks or information based on preferences that include location, date, and time. Mobile computing: refers to the development on and utilization of mobile devices. Location-Based Social Networking (LBSN): is a LBS for Social Networking (SN) in that members of the network share information based on their current location with one another. Learning resources: are those resources on a university’s campus that are routinely requested by students to assist them in their studies. CampusLocator: is a LBS that assists students on a campus to request, recommend, and be reminded of learning resources available on a campus.<br />
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The Future of WiMAX Dennis Viehland Massey University, New Zealand Sheenu Chawla SUSH Global Solutions, New Zealand<br />
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ABSTRACT WiMAX is being promoted as a potential solution to a number of problems that have plagued the wired and wireless broadband industry since it originated. Can WiMAX fulfill this promise in a crowded and competitive market? If so, what factors are critical to its success? Who will use WiMAX and for what purposes? This chapter identifies both the critical success factors that will give WiMAX an edge over other existing wireless technologies and the key applications that will contribute to its success. The top three critical success factors for WiMAX are availability of handset devices and consumer premise equipment, bandwidth speed, and interoperability and standardization. A panel of WiMAX experts concludes that broadband on demand, wireless services provider access, and Voice over IP are the top three killer applications for WiMAX.<br />
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INTRODUCTION WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) is an emerging wireless technology that promises to change the way people access the Internet by providing them additional freedom to stay connected seamlessly. WiMAX is engineered to deliver ubiquitous fixed and mobile services such as VoIP, on-demand video, online music, Internet access, multimedia messaging, and online DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch020<br />
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shopping to end users at data rates as high as 72 Mbps and covering a large geographical area, up to about 50 kilometers or 31 miles. Throughout the world, but especially in the executive offices of mobile network operators (MNO) and equipment manufacturers, the questions being asked are: Is this potential real? What the critical success factors that will determine the future of WiMAX? What are potential killer applications for WiMAX? This chapter explores the future prospects for WiMAX in a world of diverse and rapidly<br />
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Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.<br />
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expanding telecommunications options. The first objective is to identify the technical and business issues – critical success factors – that will determine the future of WiMAX. The principal research question is “What are the critical success factors that will give WiMAX an advantage over other existing wireless technologies?” The second objective is to assess the potential market for WiMAX. Specifically, this research addresses the research question: “What are the killer applications that will determine the future of WiMAX?” In fulfilling these objectives, this chapter offers an in-depth examination of WiMAX, its potential, and its future.<br />
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BACKGROUND This section begins by offering a brief explanation of WiMAX. More detailed material on WiMAX is available from a variety of sources including Pareek (2006), Senza Fili Consulting (2005), Thelander (2005), and the WiMAX Forum (www. wimaxforum.org). Then WiMAX capabilities are explored in more depth by identifying 12 factors that distinguish WiMAX from other wireless technologies. Indeed, this subsection offers the most comprehensive comparison of competing telecommunication technologies currently available in the literature. Finally, opportunities for deployment of WiMAX are explored by identifying six potential applications or application areas.<br />
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Overview of WiMAX WiMAX is sometimes called a wireless metropolitan area network or WMAN because its intended range of 50 kilometers (31.1 miles) is approximately the size of a metropolitan area. As such, WiMAX sits between wireless local area network (WLAN) technologies such as Wi-Fi and the cellular networks used on mobile telephones (wireless wide area networks or WWAN). Unlike Wi-Fi, WiMAX is available at anytime and<br />
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anywhere in the coverage area; so a “meeting warrior” could move from location to location without having to make new connections to a new local area network each time. WiMAX’s advantage over cellular networks is speed – at 72 Mbps (peak rate), WiMAX is faster than any 3G cellular network and comparable to data rate speeds expected for Long Term Evolution (LTE) or 4G. What gives WiMAX its high data rate is orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), which allows multiple carrier signals to be sent at different frequencies, some of the bits on each channel. WiMAX is based on the broadband wireless access standard IEEE 802.16. There are two forms of WiMAX – fixed version (IEEE 802.16-2004) and the mobile version (IEEE 802.16-2005). This study focuses on the mobile version of WiMAX, and all references to WiMAX in this chapter refer to mobile WiMAX unless explicitly stated otherwise. WiMAX is no longer just an imaginary tale. After ratification of the Mobile IEEE 802.16 standard in 2006, several WiMAX networks have been tried and deployed in South Korea (Wu, 2006), the United States (“Sprint Nextel Announces”, 2006), and New Zealand (“Hamilton Poised to Become”, 2006).<br />
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Success Factors for WiMAX This section identifies 12 factors that may influence the future of WiMAX, based on a review of the business-oriented WiMAX literature. These factors, listed in alphabetical order, are the basis for answering the question “What are the critical success factors that will give WiMAX an advantage over other existing wireless technologies?” Accordingly, many of the factors discuss WiMAX in comparison to other technologies (e.g., WiFi, 3G) that are commonly known or described elsewhere in the literature. Later in this chapter, the results of a Delphi survey of WiMAX and telecommunication experts will be reported to<br />
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determine the critical success factors that will determine the future of WiMAX. Bandwidth speed: The slotted time division multiple access mechanism (TDMA) used by WiMAX, coupled with the adaptive modulation scheme, makes it possible for WiMAX to transmit up to 72 Mbps in a channel of only 20 MHz, a much better performance than the mobile Wi-Fi networks which can transmit 54 Mbps at 20 MHz (Fourty, Val, Fraisse, & Mercier, 2005). WiMAX also has a performance edge in delivering IP data services compared to 3G technologies, which support data rates ranging from 144 Kbps in a highly mobile environment to 2 Mbps in a static environment. WiMAX uses orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), a multiplexing technique that gives network operators higher throughput and capacity, great flexibility in managing spectrum resources, and improved indoor coverage. Its performance is further enhanced by the use of time division duplex (TDD), which is a more simple and efficient mechanism to implement multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) and beam forming in WiMAX networks (WiMAX Forum, 2006). Long Term Evolution (LTE) on 4G networks will challenge WiMAX speeds, but WiMAX will have a two-to-three year time advantage over LTE, which is still in development and several years away from widespread deployment. Consumer cost: The cost-benefit dilemma of WiMAX is that “the economics of WiMax do not look as promising as the technology” (“WhyMax?”, 2007). Although WiMAX is better in terms of range and performance than competing technologies, the anticipated base station cost and equipment prices of WiMAX are significantly higher than Wi-Fi equipment prices. “WiMAX is not likely to replace residential or business LANs; however, it is very attractive for applications such as last-mile access to business buildings, residential access, interconnection of Wi-Fi hot spots, or MAN [metropolitan area network]” (Wu, 2006, p. 12).<br />
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On the other hand, WiMAX is capable of supporting fixed, nomadic, portable, and mobile broadband connectivity on the same network and therefore, it has the potential to meet the rising demand of customers for cost-effective and higher throughput mobile broadband wireless services. “The business case for WiMAX is attractive as the cost of the equipment is kept low by a combination of interoperable components based on open standards, mass adoption of subscriber units, an attractive IPR [intellectual property rights] structure, and a high base station capacity” (WiMAX Forum, 2006, p. 11). “But if WiMAX is ever to enjoy the level of mass market deployments experienced by Wi-Fi, the cost of CPE [consumer premise equipment] will have to drop sharply from the $500 vendors were asking last year. For the fixed residential market, you need the CPE price point to go at or below $200 to get an attractive business case,” states Monica Paolini, wireless technologies analyst with Senza Fili Consulting (2005, p. 40). The attractive prices offered by the Wi-Fi data cards or embedded Wi-Fi solutions and the rapidly falling prices of 3G solutions are making it even more difficult for WiMAX to gain interest from end users. Flexible and scalable architecture: Unlike other wireless standards such as 3G, which address transmissions over a single frequency range, WiMAX allows data transport over multiple broad frequency ranges. “WiMAX’s channel sizes range from 1.5 to 20 MHz, giving a WiMAX network the flexibility to support a variety of data rates such as T1 (1.5 Mbps) and higher data rates of over 70 Mbps” (Fujitsu, 2004, p. 3). This flexibility allows WiMAX networks to adapt to the available spectrum in different countries and to transmit over frequencies that avoid interference with other wireless applications. The scalability of WiMAX offers network operators a profitable business model by providing them the capability to adapt the network configuration to their marketing strategy depending upon<br />
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the coverage and throughput required by the end users (Intel, 2003). The advanced IP-based architecture gives WiMAX the flexibility to be deployed both in greenfield deployments, where network operators rely exclusively on WiMAX to facilitate a rapid, low cost, rollout of new applications, and in overlay or complementary networks, where operators embed WiMAX within their networks to increase capacity and throughput such as in already existing 3G networks (Gray, 2006). Frequency bands and modulation techniques: WiMAX can use both licensed and unlicensed spectrum. Licensed spectrum enables WiMAX to maintain the high quality of service it promises, however it is not always available. In many countries, licensed radio spectrum needed to deploy WiMAX has already either been distributed by governments or dedicated for other purposes by non-WiMAX carriers. Although the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz non-licensed bands (unlicensed spectrum) used by WiMAX are largely available free of cost, quality of service (QoS) is compromised due to inference, limited power transmission, restrictions on availability and prospects for increased competition in these spectra (Thelander, 2005). When use of unlicensed spectrum is necessary, WiMAX requires line-of-sight deployments at higher radio frequencies, which necessitate the installation of additional antennas to cover the same service area, thereby further increasing the cost of deployment. WiMAX makes use of smart antenna technologies to overcome this difficulty, but these technologies are costly and not well suited to support a vehicular user who is moving at highway speed. The CSMA-CA mechanism used by Wi-Fi networks makes it contention-based, which means that the users who are on the same channel need to share the same capacity and thus, as the number of users increase, the performance of Wi-Fi networks degrade (Abichar, Peng, & Chang, 2006). However, WiMAX is a carrier-grade technology<br />
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whose MAC layer is based on a slotted time division mechanism (TDMA) that allows a homogeneous distribution of the bandwidth between all the devices, which makes it possible to obtain a better optimization of the radio frequency, thus increasing its effectiveness to 5 Bps/Hz compared to the 2.7 Bps/Hz of Wi-Fi (Fourty et al., 2005). Furthermore, WiMAX uses a robust and dynamic modulation scheme which allows the base station to tradeoff throughput for range (Intel, 2003). This provides significant range and bandwidth benefits to the end users who can stay connected seamlessly without loosing their connection. Infrastructure cost: A cost factor favoring the adoption of WiMAX over 3G is that 3G licenses have been awarded in a number of markets at a very high cost; hence 3G service providers do not want to invest in costly networks in rural areas, due to the limited rates of return on the investment. In contrast, WiMAX has an advantage of using unlicensed spectrum, which comes free of cost, and thus it provides a viable and cost-effective solution to fulfill the Internet and basic voice needs of these unserved areas. WiMAX can also provide a cost-effective backhaul solution for cellular wide area networks, thereby reducing their network operating costs by two-thirds. Furthermore, the throughput and spectral efficiency advantages of WiMAX results in fewer base stations to achieve a desired data density, which greatly reduces the network capital costs for a given network capacity and, with lower equipment maintenance costs, results in lower operating expenses as well (Gray, 2006). Thus the increased range and coverage of WiMAX will enable network operators to cost effectively provide broadband wireless service in areas where 3G networks are unprofitable and/or infeasible due to the small number of customers using the service. Interoperability and standardization: Interoperability is the ability of software and hardware on multiple machines from multiple vendors to communicate with each other (Cun-<br />
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ningham, 2005). A lack of established standards in early development of legacy mobile network technologies “made it hard for wireless broadband access providers to be competitive and profitable. To combat these issues the 802.16 standard was conceived” (Johnston & LaBrecque, 2003, p. 3). WiMAX benefits from the support of the WiMAX Forum consisting of more than 300 members worldwide. This support enables WiMAX to become a global technology-based standard for broadband wireless access that ensures compatibility and interoperability across multiple vendors worldwide. This interoperability reduces the early investment of an operator and also encourages manufacturers to build a high volume of products, driving down the cost of equipment and increasing competition among vendors. There are not competing standards such as CDMA versus GSM in the 3G market or 802.11a versus 802.11b in WiFi networks. “WiMAX is based on international, vendor-neutral standards, which make it easier for end-users to transport and use their SS [subscriber station] at different locations, or with different service providers” (Westech, 2005, p. 4). Thus WiMAX is a technology standard that promises to meet the growing demand for cost-effective personal broadband services. Latency: Although WiMAX has an edge over Mobile Broadband Wireless Access (MBWA) in terms of performance, MBWA promises to provide much lower latency, 10 ms compared to 25-40 ms for WiMAX, making it much more appropriate for real-time applications such as VoIP at very high vehicular speeds of up to 250 km/hr (155 mph). However, the MBWA IEEE 802.20 standard is still at a preliminary stage. Thus, WiMAX has an advantage in that its products will reach the market before MBWA-based devices, potentially giving WiMAX an edge over MBWA. Furthermore, the challenge from WiMAX has led many of the members of the IEEE 802.20 group to withdraw themselves due to the uncertainty of the standard’s success.<br />
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In contrast, the latency in real time applications such as VoIP experienced by Wi-Fi networks is comparable to WiMAX and latency experienced by 3G networks is much more than WiMAX networks, making 3G networks mostly unsuitable for these real-time applications. Mobility: In today’s mobility-based world, consumers are demanding access to the Internet anytime and from anywhere they are. WiMAX networks are capable of supporting fixed, nomadic, portable, and wireless broadband connectivity on the same network. The WiMAX IEEE 802.162005 standard has the potential to provide mobility, roaming, support for idle/sleep mode, and multiple hand-off mechanisms, ranging from hard handoffs (with break-before-make links) to soft handoffs (with make-before-break links), thus allowing portability and full mobility at speeds up to 160 km/hr (99 mph) (Westech, 2005). Quality of service: WiMAX benefits from in-built support for QoS and low latency that are required for real-time applications such as VoIP, video gaming, streaming, and video conferencing. WiMAX networks make use of time division multiplexing (TDM) in the downlink and time division multiple access (TDMA) in the uplink data stream, thereby allowing the management of delay-sensitive services such as voice and video. Unlike Wi-Fi, in which users experience delay when the network is overwhelmed, WiMAX networks avoid interference and collision by allocating a small portion of each transmitted frame as a contention slot. The subscriber can use this contention slot to request the base station, which then evaluates the subscriber station’s request in the context of the subscriber’s service-level agreement and allocates a slot in which the subscriber station can transmit (Fujitsu, 2004). This allows for much higher utilization of available channel resources and maximizes each subscriber’s data rate, thereby improving the quality of service. Quick deployment: The use of unlicensed spectrum gives the ability to quickly deploy WiMAX networks without waiting for long queues<br />
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of licenses as in 3G networks. Clark (2006, p. 46) quotes CEO Gary Forsee as saying, “WiMAX deployment will be four times faster than 3g [3G]”. This kind of flexibility and ability to quickly provision service can give WiMAX operators an edge over the existing wireless broadband access providers. Fast and easy installation of WiMAX infrastructure also provides an opportunity for the network providers to deploy WiMAX networks in developing countries, rural areas or disaster sites such as Hurricane Katrina (Robinson, 2005) at a much lower cost. WiMAX requires little or no external plant construction, compared to deployment of wired networks. Range (line of sight; non line of sight): Unlike existing Wi-Fi standards such as 802.11 a/b/g/n which have limited coverage of only a few hundred meters, WiMAX is frequently described as a wireless metropolitan area network (e.g., Pareek, 2006) that is designed to cover a large geographical area and so can replace multiple hotspots (Robinson, 2005). A critical advantage of WiMAX over Wi-Fi is that WiMAX can provide excellent coverage to an area up to 50 kilometers (31.1 miles) in line of sight (LOS) operation or 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) in non line of sight (NLOS) operation from a single access point (Cayla, Cohen, & Guigon, 2005). This gives WiMAX the ability to provide users with the freedom, immediacy, and ease of use to access wireless Internet anywhere they are. “The touted reliability of WiMAX, analysts say, will help companies support a truly mobile workforce, where going online is the proverbial no-brainer no matter where a worker is located” (Robinson, 2005, p. 33). Security: “IEEE recognizes that weak security is a major drawback of existing WLAN [WiFi] technology” (Wu, 2006, p. 5). On the other hand, IEEE has incorporated robust and flexible encryption capabilities into the WiMAX standard to ensure private and secure transmission of data between the base station and the subscriber station.<br />
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WiMAX makes use of strong encryption standards, such as 56-bit data encryption standard (DES), 152-bit advanced encryption standard (AES), Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP), and X.509 authentication certificates. These standards are much more robust than the Wireless Equivalent Privacy (WEP) initially used by WLAN. Additionally, these security standards are flexible, giving manufacturers the ability to implement more powerful or lesser powerful encryption technologies as a way to differentiate their products and promote added capabilities (Hasan, 2006). “WiMAX also has built-in VLAN [virtual local area network] support, which provides protection for data that is being transmitted by different users on the same base station” (Westech, 2005, p. 3).<br />
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WiMAX Applications In this section the emphasis changes to focus on who will use WiMAX and for what purposes. It addresses the question “What are the killer applications that will determine the future of WiMAX?” with killer application being defined broadly as an application, service or usage scenario that creates compelling value to reach widespread popularity among a large number of users. A search of the business-oriented WiMAX literature identified potential applications including the ones listed below as well as cellular backhaul, interactive gaming, telemedicine, and others. In the first round of the Delphi survey (described in the next section), the telecommunication experts selected the following six applications for further consideration in rounds two and three of the Delphi survey. Broadband on demand: WiMAX allows end users to enjoy high-speed broadband access for voice and data services ubiquitously, especially when they are outside the range of the nearest Wi-Fi hotspot, and with faster service for less cost than over 3G cellular networks. WiMAX allows service providers to provide broadband Internet services to businesses in a matter of days, not weeks<br />
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or months that is typical for a T1 line installation from local exchange carriers. WiMAX also allows instantly configurable on-demand high-speed connectivity for temporary events including trade shows, international conferences, and major sporting events. WiMAX enables service providers to scale up or scale down broadband service levels as required by the customer. This instant on-demand connectivity also benefits businesses, such as construction sites, that have sporadic broadband connectivity requirements (Intel, 2003). Developing countries: WiMAX has a good market opportunity in developing countries such as Latin America, Eastern Europe, and parts of Asia (Schroth, 2005). WiMAX’s quality of service (QoS) support, longer reach, and data rates similar to digital subscriber line (DSL) have the potential to supply broadband wireless access and basic voice services to these areas in a fast and cost-effective manner. WiMAX fulfils all the needs of such unserved areas by providing them a cost-effective, broad range, and scalable network (Chauville, Chatelain, & Van Wyk, 2004) bridging the digital divide (Cayla, et al., 2005). Public safety in emergency situations: Government public safety agencies such as police, fire, and search and rescue teams can use WiMAX networks to handle emergency situations by enabling transfer of voice and video images from an emergency site to expert teams and help them to analyze the situation in real time, as if they were on site, as is being done in Fresno, California (O’Shea, 2006). A temporary WiMAX network can be quickly deployed at the site of a major accident or at a disaster, something that is difficult for wired networks to do because of the unpredictability of accidents and disasters (Westech, 2005). Traffic management and mobile police: A possible traffic management application is a WiMAX network that can sense traffic backups and alert the user of approaching traffic congestion. This network can also be used by transport officials for warning purposes such as work zone warning,<br />
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traffic signal violation warning, stop sign warning, road condition warning, curve speed warning, and real-time video-based criminal checks. Voice over IP: “VoIP is expected to be one of the most popular WiMAX applications. Its value proposition is immediate to most users: with a data connection plan, VoIP calls can be received or placed at a very low or, in some cases, no additional cost” (WiMAX Forum, 2006). Wireless service provider access network: “Since WiMAX is easy to deploy, the CLEC [Competitive Local Exchange Carrier] can quickly install its network and be in position to compete with the ILEC (Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier)” (Westech, 2005 p. 18). WiMAX provides an attractive wireless broadband choice for end customers, providing them a common network platform, offering voice, data, and video services in a one-stop shop for multi-level services and a single monthly bill. WiMAX offers service providers different revenue streams and increased ARPU (average revenue per user) (Martikainen, 2006).<br />
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THE FUTURE OF WIMAX Based on an extensive review of the WiMAX literature, two lists of WiMAX success factors and applications were developed, as described in the previous section. To determine which factors were critical to WiMAX success and which applications were killer applications, 12 international experts were recruited to serve on a panel and participate in a Delphi Method survey. This section begins with a very brief description of the research methodology used to examine the research questions. Then the results are presented – identifying the critical success factors and killer applications that will determine the future of WiMAX. A more detailed explanation of the methodology used in this study and the results reported in this section are available in Chawla and Viehland (2008) and Chawla and Viehland (2009).<br />
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The Delphi Method The Delphi Method aims to acquire the most reliable and consolidated consensus of opinion from a group of geographically dispersed experts by aggregating the knowledge, opinions, and judgments of these experts on a particular research topic through a series of intensive questionnaires and controlled feedback from the individuals. More information about the Delphi Method is available in Weaver (1971) and especially Linstone and Turoff (2002). In this study, the Delphi Method began by recruiting 12 individuals to serve on the Delphi panel. The experts were from eight countries; seven experts were actively engaged in business or engineering projects involving WiMAX and the other five were involved in research, marketing, manufacturing or consulting in the mobile telecommunications industry. In the first round of the Delphi Method, panelists were asked to read an extensive literature review as background, and then to vote whether to retain each factor / application for round two or not. Panelists were also invited to nominate and justify any factor / application that was missing from the literature. In round two, the panel was provided with a report that summarized the results obtained from round one – including all comments – and a questionnaire that asked each panelist to (a) decide to retain or not any new factors / applications and (b) rate all factors / applications from “very critical” (1 on a Likert scale) to “not critical at all” (5). Panelists were also strongly encouraged to provide explanations for their rankings. The primary purpose of round three was to reach a consensus of the experts’ opinions on the rankings and to discover the reasons behind divergent views. The panelists were provided with a report that summarized the results from round two and a questionnaire that asked them to confirm or change their rating for the final factors<br />
<br />
/ applications, after considering the ratings and comments of other panelists in round two.<br />
<br />
Critical Success Factors that Will Determine the Future of WiMAX As noted above, in round one panelists were provided with background on all 12 success factors identified in the literature review and asked to retain or not for the next round. At the end of round one, range for line of sight was removed because of low votes and was not included in subsequent rounds. Additionally, eight factors to be added to this list were nominated by one or more panelists. After a review of all eight factors by the researchers, four factors – ability of new network operators to easily enter the market, availability of handset devices and consumer premise equipment (CPE), WiMAX’s support of voice and data services on open networks, and symmetry in multiplexing – were added to the list for round two. Of these four factors, only “availability of handset devices and CPE” was voted to go forward to round three (the other three nominated factors did not receive majority support), so 13 factors with rankings and explanatory comments were included in the final list in round three. The ratings of the panelists for each of the thirteen success factors in round 3 are shown in Table 1 (SD = standard deviation) in rank order. Five panelists changed a total of twelve ratings in the third round; the other seven panelists retained their ratings from round two; there was no material change in the overall results. Accordingly, the goal to reach a consensus on the most critical success factors of WiMAX was achieved in round three. According to the Delphi panel of experts, the availability of handset devices and consumer premise equipment (CPE) is the top critical success factor that will determine the future of WiMAX. Although there was a reference to consumer premise equipment in the consumer cost factor, availability of handsets and CPE was not<br />
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The Future of WiMAX<br />
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Table 1. Results for WiMAX Success Factors in Round Three €€€€€Factor Availability of handset devices and CPE<br />
<br />
€€€€€Mean<br />
<br />
€€€€€SD<br />
<br />
1.42<br />
<br />
0.51<br />
<br />
Bandwidth speed<br />
<br />
1.58<br />
<br />
0.79<br />
<br />
Interoperability and standardization<br />
<br />
1.75<br />
<br />
0.75<br />
<br />
Consumer cost<br />
<br />
1.83<br />
<br />
1.03<br />
<br />
Range for non line of sight<br />
<br />
1.83<br />
<br />
0.72<br />
<br />
Quality of service<br />
<br />
2.00<br />
<br />
1.13<br />
<br />
Mobility<br />
<br />
2.17<br />
<br />
1.11<br />
<br />
Frequency bands and modulation techniques<br />
<br />
2.17<br />
<br />
1.19<br />
<br />
Latency<br />
<br />
2.25<br />
<br />
0.62<br />
<br />
Infrastructure cost<br />
<br />
2.33<br />
<br />
1.07<br />
<br />
Quick deployment<br />
<br />
2.50<br />
<br />
0.90<br />
<br />
Flexible and scalable architecture<br />
<br />
2.58<br />
<br />
0.90<br />
<br />
Security<br />
<br />
2.58<br />
<br />
0.99<br />
<br />
identified from a review of the literature. Panelists gave it considerable support with comments such as “this is a key factor in driving consumer demand. Perceived availability and choice to the consumer versus competing technologies will be the key to initial uptake” (expert 1) and “for mobility, no handsets and ecosystem, no volumes” (expert 11). Other consumer-oriented factors also appeared at the top of the list. Bandwidth received unanimous support in round one and very high support (seven panelists rated it 1 = very critical) in round three. Expert 5 gave bandwidth his only #1 rating, saying “The purpose of new WiMAX research development has been greatly tied to the speed of bandwidth. It is therefore of great importance that this new wireless technology development gets tied to high bandwidth speed operations.” Other highly rated consumer-oriented factors included cost (#4), range for non-line of sight (#5), quality of service (#6), and mobility (#7). Only security rated low (#13), which is slightly surprising given that security enhancements in WiMAX have been given considerable visibility in the literature. Only the other hand, it wasn’t considered “non-critical” as it did pass through<br />
<br />
322<br />
<br />
round 1 and still scored 2.58 (slightly less than “critical” but still above “neutral”) in round three. A number of technical issues (e.g., interoperability and standardization, frequency bands, latency) dominate the middle of the ratings as critical success factors. Less-than-critical are factors that are most of concern to the mobile network operators – infrastructure cost, quick deployment, and flexible and scalable architecture.<br />
<br />
Killer Applications that Will Determine the Future of WiMAX The principal outcome of round one of the Delphi survey was confirmation of the six potential WiMAX applications that should go through into the second round. The Delphi panel also nominated several potential killer applications, but these were determined to be largely duplicative of items already on the list. For example, mobile conferencing was nominated, but it was considered to have the same rationale as Voice over IP. In round two, the comments made in round one were sent to the panelists with a questionnaire that asked them to rank the killer applications from 1 to 6 according to the question “How likely is this<br />
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The Future of WiMAX<br />
<br />
service to become a killer application of WiMAX?” (1 = most likely; 6 = least likely). These results (mean rank) are shown in Table 2. Panelists were also encouraged to comment on why they ranked each application high or low. In round three, the detailed results from round two were sent to each panelist and they were asked to compare their rankings with those of other panelists and read the comments from round two; then rank the applications again either changing their rankings or keeping them the same. The results are shown in Table 2, listed from high to low. As with the success factors, there was very little difference between the results for rounds 2 and 3; therefore a consensus of the panel had been achieved at the end of round three Broadband on demand was selected to be the most likely killer application for WiMAX, six of the 12 panelists ranking it as #1. The reasons for this top ranking were evident in some of the comments of the panelists: “This is a simple straight forward Wi-Fi like application, which will expand the distance limits of Wi-Fi and provide BWA [broadband wireless access] everywhere, not limited to 100m of the Wi-Fi” (expert 4). “The WiMAX network will provide the broader services desired by end users, who will drive the carriers for on-demand services” (expert 10). The second highest ranking killer application was wireless service provider access network. There was considerable difference between this and broadband on demand, and so this is might be considered a “distant second”. Two supporting<br />
<br />
comments from experts on the panel were “This is similar to broadband on demand, and will be important for business/consumer users” (expert 3) and “This is a big cost saver and the future!” (expert 8). Voice over IP was the only killer application to show a gain in its ranking between rounds 2 and 3 – all other applications remained the same or slipped slightly. Perhaps panelists were swayed by the enthusiastic comment by expert 6 in round two: “This is the most often asked-for service of our customers, definitely THE killer application!”. The remaining three killer applications fell below the minimal threshold of 3.0, indicating the panelists felt these were unlikely to be killer applications that would determine the success of WiMAX.<br />
<br />
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS AND CONCLUSION Among the highlights of this study: • <br />
<br />
• <br />
<br />
The results from this study will help mobile network operators such as Vodafone and Sprint and equipment makers such as Intel to critically analyze the factors that will make WiMAX a success in the marketplace. The study produced some new and somewhat surprising conclusions, such as the rating of handset and CPE availability as<br />
<br />
Table 2. Killer Applications for WiMAX €€€€€Round 2<br />
<br />
€€€€€Round 3<br />
<br />
Broadband on demand<br />
<br />
1.83<br />
<br />
1.83<br />
<br />
Wireless service provider access network<br />
<br />
2.58<br />
<br />
2.67<br />
<br />
Voice over IP<br />
<br />
3.12<br />
<br />
2.92<br />
<br />
Developing countries<br />
<br />
3.42<br />
<br />
3.42<br />
<br />
Public safety in emergency situations<br />
<br />
4.50<br />
<br />
4.50<br />
<br />
Traffic management and mobile police<br />
<br />
4.58<br />
<br />
4.75<br />
<br />
€€€€€Application<br />
<br />
323<br />
<br />
The Future of WiMAX<br />
<br />
• <br />
<br />
• <br />
<br />
• <br />
<br />
the number one critical success factor for WiMAX success, a conclusion not found in the review of the literature. The results support further support, investment, and research for WiMAX. For example, broadband on demand as the top killer application is good news for WiMAX vendors and supporters because as public demand for fast data services continues to grow, consumers will turn to WiMAX networks. The comparative analysis in the discussion of the success factors provides an examination of a variety of issues about WiMAX and its position and potential success in the mobile broadband marketplace. To the best of our knowledge, this study has been based on the most comprehensive comparative literature review that has been done in this area. The results themselves have a great deal of credibility because of the international composition and varied perspectives of the panelists.<br />
<br />
Broadband Internet is becoming a necessity for residential and business users worldwide. In today’s world of mobility, consumers are beginning to demand continuous and high-speed Internet access anytime and anywhere. WiMAX is an emerging wireless broadband Internet technology that offers an opportunity to meet this consumer need, and especially so in rural areas and developing countries where wireless networks such as Wi-Fi and 3G are expensive to deploy and limited in range. Still, WiMAX is a maturing technology and therefore it faces a number of regulatory (spectrum issues), economic, and adoption issues (competition from other standards and the penetration of other broadband networks), which it must overcome before it can be widely accepted. To achieve penetration, WiMAX will have to offer more compelling services than the existing tech-<br />
<br />
324<br />
<br />
nologies and at enticing price points. The research reported in this chapter has helped point the way to that future.<br />
<br />
REFERENCES Abichar, Z., Peng, Y., & Chang, J. M. (2006). WiMAX: The emergence of wireless broadband. IT Professional, 8(4), 44–48. doi:10.1109/ MITP.2006.99 Cayla, G., Cohen, S., & Guigon, D. (2005, November). WiMAX An efficient tool to bridge the digital divide. Retrieved April 8, 2007, from http://www.wimaxforum.org/technology/ downloads/WiMAX_to_Bridge_the_Digitaldivide.pdf Chauville, N., Chatelain, D., & Van Wyk, B. J. (2004). WiMAX access over GSM/GPRS in rural areas. Proceedings of the 12th International Symposium on Electron Devices for Microwave and Optoelectronic Applications, November 8-9, 2004, pp. 106-109. Chawla, S., & Viehland, D. (2008). Critical success factors that will determine the future of WiMAX. Proceedings of the 7th Global Mobility Roundtable Conference, Auckland, New Zealand, November 23-25, 2008, unpaged. Chawla, S., & Viehland, D. (2009). Killer applications for WiMAX. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Applications and Principles of Information Science, Okinawa, Japan, January 11-12, 2009, 358-361. Clark, R. (2006, October). Sprint breathes new life into WiMAX. America’s Network, 110(4), 46. Cunningham, P. M. (2005). Assessing the interoperability of e-Government services. In Cunningham, P., & Cunningham, M. (Eds.), Innovation and the knowledge economy: Issues, applications, case studies (pp. 429–432). Amsterdam: IOS Press.<br />
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Fourty, N., Val, T., Fraisse, T., & Mercier, J.-J. (2005). Comparative analysis of new high data rate wireless communication technologies from Wi-Fi to WiMAX. Proceedings of the Joint International Conference on Autonomic and Autonomous Systems and International Conference on Networking and Services, October 23-28, 2005, 66. Fujitsu Microelectronics America, Inc. (2004, August). WiMAX technology and deployment for last-mile wireless broadband and backhaul applications. Retrieved April 7, 2007, from http://www.fujitsu.com/downloads/MICRO/fma/ formpdf/FMA_Whitepaper_WiMAX_8_04.pdf Gray, D. (2006, September). Mobile WiMAX: A performance and comparative summary. Retrieved April 10, 2007, from http://www.wimaxforum.org/ technology/downloads/Mobile_WiMAX_Performance_and_Comparative_Summary.pdf Hamilton poised to become NZ’s first WiMAX city. (2006, October 24). Retrieved 24 March 2007, from http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU0610/ S00446.htm Hasan, J. (2006). Security issues of IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX). Proceedings of the 4th Australian Information Security Management Conference, Perth, Australia, December 5, 2006, unpaged. Intel. (2003). IEEE 802.16* and WiMAX broadband wireless access for everyone. Retrieved April 5, 2007, from http://www.wimax-industry.com/ wp/papers/intel_80216_wimax.pdf Johnston, D. J., & LaBrecque, M. (2003, August). IEEE 802.16* wireless MAN* specification accelerates wireless broadband access. Technology @ Intel Magazine, 1-5. Linstone, H. A., & Turoff, M. (Eds.). (2002). The Delphi Method techniques and applications. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.<br />
<br />
Martikainen, O. E. (2006). Complementarities creating substitutes – possible paths towards 3G, WLAN/WiMAX and ad hoc networks. The Journal of Policy, Regulation and Strategy for Telecommunications. Information and Media, 8(4), 21–32. O’Shea, D. (2006, May). WiMAX meets reality. Telephony, 247(9), 28–31. Pareek, D. (2006). WiMAX: Taking wireless to the MAX. New York: Auerbach Publications. Robinson,T.(2005).WIMAXtotheworld?netWorker, 9(4), 28–34. doi:10.1145/1103940.1103942 Schroth, L. (2005, June). The Future of WiMAX. Telephony, 246, 16–17. Senza Fili Consulting. (2005). Fixed, nomadic, portable and mobile applications for 802.16-2004 and 802.16e WiMAX Networks. Retrieved March 10, 2010, from http://www.senza-fili.com/downloads/SenzaFili_WiMAXForum_WhitePaper.pdf Sprint Nextel announces 4G wireless broadband initiative with Intel, Motorola, and Samsung. (2006, August 6). Retrieved March 10, 2010, from http://www.wimaxforum.org/news/819. Thelander, M. W. (2005, July). WiMAX opportunities and challenges in a wireless world. Retrieved April 16, 2007, from http://www.cdg. org/resources/white_papers/files/WiMAX%20 July%202005.pdf Weaver, W. T. (1971). The Delphi forecasting method. Phi Delta Kappan, 52(5), 267–273. Westech Communications Inc. (2005, October). Can WiMAX address your applications? Retrieved March 10, 2010, from http://www.redlinecommunications.com/news/resourcecenter/ whitepapers/Can_WiMAX_Address_Your_Applications_final.pdf WhyMax? (2007, February). Economist, 382(8517), 78-79.<br />
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WiMAX Forum. (2006, June). Mobile WiMAX: The best personal broadband experience! Retrieved 12 April 2007, from http://www.wimaxforum.org/ technology/downloads/MobileWiMAX_PersonalBroadband.pdf Wu, C. (2006). Net business community The next wireless wave: Exploring WiMax technology. Retrieved March 11, 2007, from http://www.csc.com/ aboutus/lef/mds67_off/uploads/2006WiMAXC. pdf<br />
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access): A wireless technology that delivers data rates as high as 72 Mbps over a large geographical area, up to about 50 kilometers (31 miles). Wireless Metropolitan Area Network (WMAN): A wireless network intended to provide a signal over an area approximately the size of a metropolitan area – approximately 50 kilometers or 31 miles. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Access (OFDM): A signal modulation technology that allows multiple carrier signals to<br />
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326<br />
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be sent at different frequencies, some of the bits on each channel. OFDM is used in both WiMAX and LTE (4G). IEEE 802.16: A set of wireless broadband standards for wireless metropolitan area networks, usually commercialized as WiMAX. The two dominant standards are 802.16-2004 (also 802.16d) that governs fixed WiMAX (signal delivery to devices in homes and offices) and 802.16-2005 (also 802.16e) that governs mobile WiMAX (signal delivery to devices in mobile devices). WiMAX Forum: A industry-based organization established to promote the compatibility and interoperability of broadband wireless products based on the IEEE 802.16 standard. Killer Application: An application, service or usage scenario that creates compelling value to reach widespread popularity among a large number of users. Delphi Method: A research methodology that is used to obtain a consensus of opinion from a group of experts about a topic of interest, usually about the future. The Delphi Method features anonymity of responses to a series of questionnaires, controlled feedback by the panel coordinator, and statistical group response to reach a consensus.<br />
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Chapter 21<br />
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Determinants of Loyalty Intention in Portuguese Mobile Market Maria Borges Tiago University of the Azores, Portugal Francisco Amaral University of the Azores, Portugal<br />
<br />
ABSTRACT Our work conceptualizes and highlights the determinants of customers’ loyalty in the Portuguese mobile market. We raise questions about the interrelationships of the cost and values dimensions and the consequences of these relationships on customer satisfaction and trust and consequently loyalty among different operators, addressing some recent models. By organizing and synthesizing the major research streams and tests empirically a conceptual framework through a SEM, with data gather in a survey of Portuguese clients, the present study advances knowledge on the nature of the relative importance of different components of loyalty to mobile communications operators. Some useful preliminary insights were produced related to customers’retention process in primary mobile operator, which appears strongly related to price/quality, followed by the emotional connection to the operator staff and others clients. Nonetheless, a considerable number of issues were left for future research, including the possibility of extending the investigation to other countries.<br />
<br />
INTRODUCTION With the emergence of high-speed wireless network technologies and the escalating market penetration of mobile phones, the need to analyze customer behavior is growing. The mobile communication phenomenon is unique in the histories of both the telecommunication and the consumer DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch021<br />
<br />
electronics markets. In less than a decade, millions of people have begun to use mobile phones. Ever since the mid-1990s, mobile phones have become ubiquitous in developed economies. While in 1997 only 215 million people worldwide were using mobile communication devices, by 2001 this number had grown to 961 million and to 2.7 billion by 2006 (Union, 2009). Mobile communication was the first telecommunication segment to be liberalized in Portugal,<br />
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Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.<br />
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Determinants of Loyalty Intention in Portuguese Mobile Market<br />
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following the breakthrough of GSM technology. Due to strong competition, the market has been growing, reaching its present penetration rate of over 100%. Portugal has been a pioneer in the massive adoption of mobile communications; it was the first country to adopt pre-paid cards and more recently to adopt mobile Internet access programs for all students in elementary and secondary school (“e-escolinhas” and “e-escolas”, respectively). The Autoridade Nacional de Comunicações (ANACOM, 2007), which supervises Portugal’s communications sector, has published a quality report of voice, video-telephony services and network coverage of GSM and WCDMA, concluding that there are no significant differences in the quality of services rendered by the various operators. For example, the Portuguese government negotiated identical prices and technical characteristics from all Portuguese mobile operators for the “e-escolinhas” and “e-escolas” programs. In an intensely mutating market where the introduction of 3G technologies, technological convergence, and the emergence of news mobile operators permits constant offerings of innovative services, customers’ loyalty is very important for a mobile operator’s success. Thus, the determinants of customer loyalty are essential for the commercial success, not only for traditional mobile operators, but also for the virtual ones. From a research standpoint, it raises an important question: what are the determinants of mobile customers’ loyalty? The objective of the present work is to elaborate on this understanding by distinguishing the different types of cost, values and quality dimensions in the literature. It establishes conceptual frameworks which consider all these components and their impact on loyalty in the mobile market. Drawing on a detailed reading of Lim, Widdows, and Park (2006) and Junglas and Watson (2008), such a conceptual framework was established and several hypotheses related to the customer<br />
<br />
328<br />
<br />
loyalty determinants were formulated: price and quality, social value, economic value, emotional value, processing costs, emotional costs and financial costs. Our analysis does not attempt to “prove” a set of claims about consumer behavior, but to develop a new interpretation, one which offers fresh insights and understanding. With this purpose in mind, data was collected and the sample obtained consists of 262 customers of Portuguese mobile operators. Using a structural equation analysis, we explore the relationship among price/quality, social value, economic value, emotional value, processing costs, emotional costs and financial costs, trying to identify the main drivers of customers’ loyalty. In general, our findings support the conceptual framework. The results sustain our conceptualization for the loyalty construct and allow us to conclude that Portuguese customers will remain with the same mobile operator primarily because of price/quality, followed by the emotional connection to the operator staff and to its other clients. However, the direct determinants of customer loyalty are satisfaction and trust. Despite these findings, the operators, regardless of their typology (non-virtual or virtual), should concern themselves primarily with establishing a basis of loyalty with current clients and secondarily with acquiring new customers, even in mature markets. Moreover, the perception of loyalty determinants change with time, so operators must constantly monitor these determinants and create new ways to increase loyalty. This research and its findings will be useful for firms intending to emulate the application of virtual mobile communications or even improve mobile communications strategies among current operators. This chapter is organized in the following manner. The next section summarizes the literature related to customer behaviors regarding mobile operators. The third section of the paper formalizes the major points presented in the conceptual model and translates them into hypotheses. In the<br />
<br />
Determinants of Loyalty Intention in Portuguese Mobile Market<br />
<br />
fourth section, the methodology is applied and the results are presented. The fifth section offers concluding remarks.<br />
<br />
LITERATURE REVIEW Mobile networks are characterized by high technical standards and homogeneity, so it is important to understand the drivers of customer loyalty (Lim, Widdows, & Park, 2006). In the literature we found a consensus on two dimensions that affect consumer behavior. However some authors present three dimensions; the third is an integration of the first two (Kim, Park, & Jeong, 2004). For some researchers, customer loyalty is the affective dimension and customer retention is a behavioral component (see, Eshghi, Haughton, & Topi, 2007; Gerpott, Rams, & Schindler, 2001; Ranganathan, Seo, & Babad, 2006). Table 1 compiles the refer-<br />
<br />
ences to articles published on the components of customer loyalty. In summarizing all these contributions, we can define the affective dimension as comprising four factors: attitude toward the service; satisfaction during and post service; trust in the service provider and in the service itself; and commitment. The behavioral dimension aggregates the costs to customers to switch operators and their use of the services. Online businesses customers avoid business relationships with providers whom they do not trust (Lin & Wang, 2006). The customer’s trust in the service provider is fundamental because customers share confidential information, and this relationship will be stronger as the two come to know each other better. Gomez, Arranz and Cillán (2006) have suggested that loyalty programs increase the customer’s trust in the supplier. Other researchers report that the trust can be seen as: (i)<br />
<br />
Table 1. Customers loyalty dimensions and components Year<br />
<br />
Authors<br />
<br />
2006<br />
<br />
Gómez et al.<br />
<br />
2001<br />
<br />
Gerpott et al.<br />
<br />
2004<br />
<br />
Kim et al.<br />
<br />
2006<br />
<br />
Gómez et al.<br />
<br />
2006<br />
<br />
Lim et al.<br />
<br />
2006<br />
<br />
Lin and Wang<br />
<br />
2006<br />
<br />
Gómez et al.<br />
<br />
2006<br />
<br />
Lin and Wang<br />
<br />
2006<br />
<br />
Gómez et al.<br />
<br />
2006<br />
<br />
Dimitriades<br />
<br />
2001<br />
<br />
Gerpott et al.<br />
<br />
2004<br />
<br />
Kim et al.<br />
<br />
2006<br />
<br />
Gómez et al.<br />
<br />
2007<br />
<br />
Kassim and Souiden<br />
<br />
2008<br />
<br />
Seo et al.<br />
<br />
2006<br />
<br />
Lin and Wang<br />
<br />
2006<br />
<br />
Gómez et al.<br />
<br />
2007<br />
<br />
Kassim and Souiden<br />
<br />
Dimensions<br />
<br />
Components Attitude<br />
<br />
Satisfaction Affective Trust Commitment<br />
<br />
Switching Costs Behavioral<br />
<br />
Habit<br />
<br />
329<br />
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Determinants of Loyalty Intention in Portuguese Mobile Market<br />
<br />
the belief that a service provider is reliable; and, (ii) Intention to stay with a service provider. The belief that the supplier is reliable is the consumers’ confidence in the provider’s competence, integrity and kindness. The intention of confidence means that the client is willing to depend on the supplier and feels safe doing so. Trust belief directly influences the intention to trust (Lin & Wang, 2006). Customers who are dissatisfied with a communications service will remain customers only until their contract ends; and then tend to switch to a new supplier. This reinforces the importance of satisfaction in customer loyalty (Ranganathan et al., 2006). Satisfaction is determined through the evaluation of all aspects of mobile service experience (Lin & Wang, 2006). In the mobile market, satisfaction is determined by a network’s and a service’s quality, price, value-added services, and customer support (Gerpott et al., 2001; Kim et al., 2004; Lee & Feick, 2001; Lim et al., 2006). Lim et al. (2006) suggested the multidimensional perceived value also as a determinant of satisfaction, more precisely, economic and emotional value. In a traditional approach to customers’ loyalty, satisfaction has been cited as a main factor, although it failed to explain all customer behaviors, suggesting that loyalty and retention concepts are more complex than originally thought (Burnham, Frels, & Mahajan, 2003). Some technical tools are used by providers to retain clients by increasing the switching costs (Gomez et al., 2006). This makes it more difficult for customers to switch to another provider (Kim et al., 2004). Table 2 was adapted from Hu and Hwang’s work on switching costs elements; their work mentions previous studies that analyzed this subject. The present study adopted the switching costs components proposed by Burnham et al. (2003) and used by Hu and Hwang (2006). These authors defined three types of switching costs: (i) procedural costs which are related to the analysis and to the process itself of switching to a new operator; (ii) financial costs reflecting the loss of the<br />
<br />
330<br />
<br />
customer’s benefit already earned, in addition to the monetary costs to change and activate a new mobile service, for example the customer must change the mobile equipment; and (iii) relational costs that are linked to the emotional ties between the client and the operator staff, and with the brand itself. Customers’ perceived quality is one of most important determinants of satisfaction (Zeithaml, Parasuraman, & Malhotra, 2002), and can be defined as the discrepancy between the expectations created and the perception of the service actually provided (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, & Berry, 1985). Perceived quality has two dimensions: (i) technical quality; and (ii) functional quality. Technical quality consists of items of core service quality, such as network quality (Lim et al., 2006). Functional quality is the manner in which the service is provided, including the client’s perception of customer care and the billing system. In the mobile telecommunications market, technical standards are imposed by manufacturers, international agencies, and by national and international telecommunication regulatory agencies. It is therefore difficult to operators to differentiate themselves simply through technical quality, so functional quality items merit special attention (Lim et al., 2006). Table 3 summarizes the main perceived quality items in the mobile market and in the literature. Perceived value is crucial to the success of the services, because it reveals which aspects are the most valued by customers, thus improving market results (Pura, 2005). According to several authors despite the academic research and organizational practices developed around the perceived value effect concept, in mobile telecommunications market a considerable gap in literature remains (Lim et al., 2006; Pura, 2005). Not all customers give the same importance to the same services and for this reason researchers have studied specific perceived value regarding some services characteristics (Sweeney & Soutar, 2001). In their study of loyalty in the mobile market, Lim et al.<br />
<br />
Determinants of Loyalty Intention in Portuguese Mobile Market<br />
<br />
Table 2. Components of switching costs proposed by various researchers Year<br />
<br />
Authors<br />
<br />
Components<br />
<br />
Industry<br />
<br />
1. Financial Costs 2. Performance-related costs 1991<br />
<br />
Murray<br />
<br />
3. Social costs<br />
<br />
Internet<br />
<br />
4. Psychological costs 5. Self-related costs 2001<br />
<br />
Lee et al.<br />
<br />
1. Transaction costs 2. Search Costs<br />
<br />
Mobile phone service market in France<br />
<br />
1. Procedural switching costs a. Economy risk costs b. Evaluation costs c. Learning costs d. Setup costs 2003<br />
<br />
Burnham et al.<br />
<br />
2. Financial switching costs a. Benefit losses<br />
<br />
Credit Card industry & long-distance and local telephone services<br />
<br />
b. Monetary loss costs 3. Relational switching costs a. Personal relationship loss costs b. Brand relationship loss costs 1. Loss costs 2004<br />
<br />
Kim et al.<br />
<br />
2. Adaptation costs<br />
<br />
Korean mobile telecommunication services<br />
<br />
3. Move-in costs 1. Procedural switching costs a. Economy risk costs b. Evaluation costs c. Learning costs d. Setup costs 2006<br />
<br />
Hu and Hwang<br />
<br />
2. Financial switching costs<br />
<br />
Taiwan mobile telecommunication services<br />
<br />
a. Benefit losses b. Monetary loss costs 3. Relational switching costs a. Personal relationship loss costs b. Brand relationship loss costs 2008<br />
<br />
Seo et al.<br />
<br />
1. Learning Costs 2. Transaction Costs<br />
<br />
U.S.A mobile telecommunications services<br />
<br />
Source: Hu & Hwang (2006)<br />
<br />
(2006) used the dimensions proposed by Sweeney and Soutar (2001)--emotional value and social value -- and a third dimension--economic value--<br />
<br />
that was studied by Levesque and McDougall (2000) and Chen (2003).<br />
<br />
331<br />
<br />
Determinants of Loyalty Intention in Portuguese Mobile Market<br />
<br />
Table 3. Perceived quality items Year<br />
<br />
Authors<br />
<br />
Mobile Perceived Quality Items Network quality;<br />
<br />
2001<br />
<br />
Gerpott et al.<br />
<br />
Prices Customer care Call quality Pricing structure<br />
<br />
2004<br />
<br />
Kim et al.<br />
<br />
Mobile device Value-added services Convenience in procedures Customer support Aditional services Coverage of network<br />
<br />
2005<br />
<br />
Busacca and Padula<br />
<br />
Clearness of voice Competence of contact personnel Kindness of contact personnel Transparency Pricing plans Network quality Data services messaging services<br />
<br />
2006<br />
<br />
Lim et al.<br />
<br />
Entertainment services Locator services Billing system Customer care<br />
<br />
Economic value considers the perception of economic benefits received in comparison to the monetary cost of the service (Chen, 2003; Levesque & McDougall, 2000; Lim et al., 2006). Emotional value considers customers’ reactions as manifested in their feelings or emotional states resulting from their use of the service (Lim et al., 2006; Sweeney & Soutar, 2001). Social value is the value obtained from a product’s ability to increase the user’s social self-esteem (Lim et al., 2006; Sweeney & Soutar, 2001). In the mcommerce context, Pura (2005) and Lim et al. (2006) suggested that social value loses much of its importance, since it does not have a crucial role in customer loyalty.<br />
<br />
332<br />
<br />
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK AND HYPOTHESES In mature, saturated or highly competitive markets, where the effort of recruiting new customers is very high, companies are beginning to look more closely and differently at customer loyalty, because the effort to keep them is considerably smaller and can be quite lucrative (Lim et al., 2006). These situations have also been found in the mobile market, which might explain why customer loyalty has even greater importance for mobile operators (Kim et al., 2004). Lim et al. (2006) suggest that loyalty is directly influenced by satisfaction, and that satisfaction is influenced by the economic value, emotional<br />
<br />
Determinants of Loyalty Intention in Portuguese Mobile Market<br />
<br />
value and mobile services quality. In their work on the South Korean mobile market, Kim et al. (2004), identified switching cost and satisfaction as determinants of switching costs. Hu and Hwang (2006), regarding the empirical evidences from Taiwan mobile market, studied the procedural switching costs and relational switching costs and suggest that financial switching costs do not play a significant role in the intention to switch to another mobile operator. Trust is one of the dimensions of emotional loyalty, noticing that customers who participate in loyalty programs trust more on their suppliers, compared with customers who do not participate in these programs (Gomez et al., 2006). Lin and Wang (2006) conclude that the trust, in addition to being a determinant of satisfaction, has a direct influence on loyalty. Following the literature reviewed in the previous section, we developed a research model (Figure 1) which represents the proposed drivers of loyalty intention in mobile markets. For that purpose we use a structural equation model with latent variables, which consists of two sub models: the measurement model and the structural equation model. The former shows how the latent variables<br />
<br />
or factors are measured and the latter indicates the relationships among the latent variables. The validation of the measurement model is done by using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). As we will see, the observable variables (indicators) that were selected are measures of eight latent variables (factors). We assume that these factors each have an indirect effect on loyalty via their combined implementation and two of them have a direct effect on loyalty. This model identifies how the mobile loyalty - Loyalty to a mobile services provider - is affected and what paths can be followed by mobile operators to keep the loyalty of their customers. Some relationships were not referenced in the literature covering consumer behavior in mobile markets, despite the empirical evidence. Lim et al. (2006) consider economic value as the perception of the economic benefits of a service, compared to the cost and found that the price of mobile services directly influences their economic value. Furthermore, Gerpott et al. (2001) concluded that price has a direct influence on satisfaction. Hence, the foregoing discussion suggests that:<br />
<br />
Figure 1. Research model<br />
<br />
333<br />
<br />
Determinants of Loyalty Intention in Portuguese Mobile Market<br />
<br />
H1a: Price has a strong influence on satisfaction. H1b: Price has a strong influence on economic value. The emotional value that has been characterized by (Sweeney & Soutar) as the value obtained from feelings or emotional states of clients as a result of their use of the product. These authors concluded that this value has a great importance in buyers’ re-purchase or re-use. Lim et al. (2006) also found that there is a relationship between emotional value and economic value. This led to the second hypothesis: H2: Economic value strongly influences emotional value. Pura (2005) and Sweeney and Soutar (2001), cited social value as the value obtained in terms of increased social self-esteem arising from the product or service. They concluded that the social image of the product influences the intention to purchase. However, empirical evidence suggests that the social value directly influences emotional value. Thus, the third hypothesis defines social value as having a significant impact on emotional value. H3: Social value has a strong influence on emotional value. For Hu and Hwang (2006) the relational costs related to the emotional ties established among the client, the current provider and the brand itself. Empirical evidence suggests that emotional value influences relational costs. This led to the fourth hypothesis: H4: Emotional value has a strong influence on relational costs. The procedural costs are related to the analysis and to the process of switching to another provider (Hu & Hwang, 2006). According to these authors,<br />
<br />
334<br />
<br />
the procedural costs of change will influence the customers. Since empirical evidence suggests that procedural costs influence relational costs, a fifth hypothesis was defined: H5: Procedural costs strongly influence relational costs. According to Hu and Hwang (2006), relational costs are linked to the emotional ties between the client and the current provider’s team and brand. These authors suggest that relational costs will influence the switch of provider. Empirically, it is believed that relational costs influence trust. According to Lin and Wang (2006) trust is the perception regarding a provider’s capacity in the treatment of customer transactions, its integrity and the goodwill of its business. Gomez et al. (2006) believed that trust is built on and strengthened in the course of the business relationship. In this line of thought the sixth hypothesis was defined as: H6: Relational costs strongly influence trust. Customers’ loyalty includes emotional and behavioral intention to repurchase (Gerpott et al., 2001; Lin & Wang, 2006). To Eshghi et al. (2007), loyalty is the propensity of customers to stay with the same service provider. With the exception of Gerpott et al. (2001) and Eshghi et al. (2007), there is no distinction between retention and loyalty in the literature. According to Lin and Wang (2006) and Gómez et al. (2006) trust influences loyalty, the first one is an emotional dimension of loyalty. Considering these elements, the seventh hypothesis was established: H7: Trust has a strong influence on loyalty. Satisfaction is believed to influence customer loyalty (Gerpott et al., 2001; Lim et al., 2006; Lin & Wang, 2006) and for that reason hypothesis eight was developed to consider the direct influence of satisfaction on loyalty and its impact on<br />
<br />
Determinants of Loyalty Intention in Portuguese Mobile Market<br />
<br />
trust. We can determine its indirect influence on loyalty. Thus, the eighth hypothesis was written as: H8a: Satisfaction has a direct influence on loyalty. H8b: The satisfaction influences the Trust. As mentioned previously, several factors may moderate customers’ satisfaction and trust and, consequently, their loyalty to their primary mobile operator. Considering that the mobile markets present some unique features, a larger set of opportunities and new models of relationship with customers are available. Firms can use these to enhance relationship marketing and outcomes. Understanding the drivers of customer loyalty will be the focus of the remaining parts of this work, since they are the baselines for the success of these relationships.<br />
<br />
DATA TREATMENT AND RESULTS The data employed in the empirical research came from an online questionnaire set in accordance to the major points referred in literature review. A pre-test was conducted to guarantee clarity and readability of the questions. This research used the techniques of convenience and the snowball samplings (Malhotra & Birks, 2007). These techniques were used because of financial constraints, and because they were easier to apply. Convenience sampling was used to select the initial group of people living in Portugal whose e-mail addresses we had. We sent emails to that group, asking them to answer the questionnaire online and to send the link to their contacts, as long as those contacts were living in Portugal. They were not required to be Portuguese citizens. This data was collected in Portugal from March to July of 2008. Since this study examines the relationship between customers and their mobile operator, the inquiry was directed to domestic users over 10 years old, living in Portugal. We collected 306 questionnaires and dropped those<br />
<br />
with invalid and incomplete responses. So, our sample of 262 cases constitutes a heterogeneous sample of customers in terms of gender, age, education, profession and region. The sample distribution according to the gender is approximately equal (48.5% were male and 51.5% female). The two most heavily represented operators in the sample were Vodafone and TMN, with 45.80% and 40.84% respectively, followed by all other operators. Approximately 38% of responders were aged 21-30, 32% were aged 31-40, 19% were aged 41-50, 6% were aged 51-60 and 5 percent were aged 10-20. Nearly 37% of responders had a second mobile phone from another operator. The model was estimated by the Maximum Likelihood method in the AMOS package and the model goodness of fit may be considered acceptable according to the values of some goodness-of-fit indices although the chi-square test statistic (χ2 = 1355,646; df=831; p-value = 0,000) is significant, implying a bad fit. However, this test has serious limitations, namely its dependence on the sample size and the number of indicators. For that reason, it is customary to evaluate the goodness of the fit by a set of indices, also presented in Figure 2 (Hair, Anderson, Tatham, & Black, 1998). After global model fit has been assessed, the numerical results were evaluated in order to test their support of the research hypothesis. The numerical results can be obtained directly from the path coefficients of the structural model presented in Figure 2. We refer to standardized coefficients that account for scale effects and serve as indicators of the relative importance of the variables. For that reason, it is customary to evaluate the goodness of the fit by a set of indices. The goodness-of-fit indices tests were conducted to access whether the empirical model could explain the observed data. The measures for global model fit included in Figure 2 suggest that our model fits the underlying data quite well (Hair et al., 1998).<br />
<br />
335<br />
<br />
Determinants of Loyalty Intention in Portuguese Mobile Market<br />
<br />
Figure 2. Structural equation model and results of estimation<br />
<br />
All the hypothesis paths were statistically significant, with the exception of hypothesis H5. The regression coefficients estimates and their p-values are reported in Figure 3.<br />
<br />
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION Consumer behavior regarding mobile communications has been the subject of significant research in the last few years, but understanding it is complicated by the fact that the main entities involved, consumers and operators, have changed and conclusions vary according to the maturity of the market and its penetration in the country analyzed. Therefore, our aim is to develop a new<br />
<br />
336<br />
<br />
interpretation, which offers fresh insights and understanding. Based on the results of our model, we can draw the following conclusions: • <br />
<br />
• <br />
<br />
Our results confirmed some prior research regarding the relationship between economic and emotional values (Lim et al., 2006). We find a strong relation between price and economic value which influences the emotional value, and which is influenced by social value (Pura, 2005). In addition, relational costs exert a strong influence on trust, which is an emotional dimension of loyalty. Even though prior research Lin and Wang (2006) indicated the power of trust in con-<br />
<br />
Determinants of Loyalty Intention in Portuguese Mobile Market<br />
<br />
Figure 3. Standardized estimates of the model<br />
<br />
• <br />
<br />
• <br />
<br />
sumer satisfaction (Figure 3), we can empirically show that satisfaction influences loyalty and trust at the 0.001 significance level. It means that there is a consistency in this tendency and that Portuguese consumers tend to trust more and to be loyal whenever they are satisfied with the price. The portability of mobile number is proven to have lost its barrier power in the Portuguese context. It is also confirmed empirically that the price and the emotional dimensions of the perceived value and switching cost constrain the loyalty to operators in the Portuguese mobile market.<br />
<br />
We caution readers to consider that the cognitive and personal dimensions of mobile phone users await future research and that the conclusions presented are related to Portuguese mobile phone clients. For these reasons they cannot be generalized.<br />
<br />
Issues, Controversies, Problems Mobile phone handling involves the equipment, the telecommunications systems, the mobile phone users and the process of adoption and use of these<br />
<br />
systems. There is no question that mobile communication has huge market potential. There is controversy, however, over exactly what people will do with this medium in the next few years. Consumers will form a trusting relationship based on their belief that the mobile provider is offering the best services possible. Nevertheless, the concept of best service will vary accordingly to consumer specifications and not all mobile services are equally valuable to all customers. The literature on mobile consumer behavior tends to present the quality of the communications as a critical success factor in the operator/ client relationship. This factor, in the Portuguese case, does not assume as relevant in the consumer decision process. In Portugal, due to three main aspects, all the operators present a similar level of communication quality: (i) regulation of the sector; (ii) use of the same antennas; and, (iii) reduce number of components suppliers. The portability of mobile telephone numbers is another critical issue to establish a relationship based on loyalty to a mobile operator (Gerpott et al., 2001; Shin & Kim, 2007). Ever since the ANACOM 2006 report was published, this matter assumed a new importance in Portugal. The portability of a number is no longer a barrier to switching operator. The results presented here re-<br />
<br />
337<br />
<br />
Determinants of Loyalty Intention in Portuguese Mobile Market<br />
<br />
inforce that line of thought; respondents value the portability of the number, but no longer consider it critical, because all Portuguese operators offer that service. Thus, it seems important to have a portable number, but this kind of service cannot be considered as a competitive advantage. Therefore, successful mobile communications offers will consider improvements in one of the elements of the mobile communication system: hardware, software, network and business dimensions. Considering that mobile communication is a complex and rapidly evolving industry, there is an opportunity for new supplementary services that can transform themselves into true new services to specific niches and segments of the market, which are not complete and fully satisfied by the current offer. The challenge is to balance two main concepts: keep up with the advances in competition and technology that impels the creation of new complementary services and features; and, acknowledge the human dimension where the levels of sophistication of use can vary, with segments taking full benefit of the offer and other that will find difficulties to cope with the cognitive demands of the mobile phone technology.<br />
<br />
Solutions and Recommendations Our thesis is straightforward: companies that can best provide value-added user experiences, through the combination of emotional and relation values, will achieve long-term success. However, merely extending their current features will not be enough. Providers need to think about the trade-off price/quality base strategy and implement a more tightly relationship marketing strategy based on economic value will lead to greater loyalty. Nevertheless, achieving this is not necessarily easy, especially because providers need to also consider customers’ overall satisfaction. For example, the survey data we presented show that consumers recognize as primary criteria in their decision the<br />
<br />
338<br />
<br />
trade-off of price/quality. They also place a high value on the quality of certain features. To understand the bases of marketing strategy we need to examine three issues. The first is related to consumers’ needs; in this case they are of six different orders: -communication, connectivity, information, entertainment, social networks and commerce. The second pertains to the cost of the use and perceived price. The third is the consumers’ capacity to adopt technology, which will be a critical determinant of the supplementary services chosen by each client and will control the relationship with the operator (Figure 4). From a services marketing perspective, these dimensions are critical to the definition of a segmentation of the market in order to enhance customer orientation and loyalty. The rapid growth in Internet, the World Wide Web and Intranet systems over the past decade has led to a demand for more sophisticated information services, engineering techniques and methods. Mobile service providers can benefit from this rising demand if they keep the high quality of their core service and offer new complementary services that enhance customer’ daily life-base tasks. Hence, even recognizing the importance of these values dimensions to the marketing strategy, it can be difficult to it achieve in practice, since clients value the price component. With this in mind, mobile operators need to take advantage of two customer segments: pre-paid plans and post-use plans. The results clearly show that the latter, especially in Portugal, can suffer service offer improvements in the dimension related to consumer perception of cost and final price, since the price strategy applied does not correspond to the requirements that lead to customer loyalty. In addition, some investments can be made in the relational dimension, such as specific promotions in the complementary services that are most valued; this will raise the loyalty rate. A clear example of this is the expansion of 3G uses and its impact on retention rates, already acknowledged by Burnham<br />
<br />
Determinants of Loyalty Intention in Portuguese Mobile Market<br />
<br />
Figure 4. Mobile communication extend framework<br />
<br />
et al. (2003). For clients in the pre-paid plan, economic and social values assume great importance. The drivers of the marketing strategy should rely on the perception of economic benefits received in comparison to the monetary cost of the service and the social benefits (Lim et al., 2006; Sweeney & Soutar, 2001).<br />
<br />
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS We consider this study another step on the road to understanding the behavior of mobile communication consumers. Nevertheless, many questions remain unanswered. We have suggested several areas for future research that could contribute to closing this gap. A research path for future work is the study of mobile learning ontology, since most researchers acknowledge that behaviors can change in light of physical, physiological or cultural dimensions. An important variable missing from our framework is planned purchases of first-time customers. How do customers decide to become a client of a specific operator, and what factors determine<br />
<br />
this choice? Our study design did not capture first-time users of mobile phones. A future study that captures actual new customers would better explain the factors behind customer acquisition and loyalty. This area has a great potential since it has a considerable large number of very young customers. Furthermore, we leave aside the voluminous literature that uses an IT/systems perspective to address issues relating to the adoption of technology. Since many additional individual and environmental factors can determine a consumer’s emotional and rational responses to technological offers, it would be interest to analyze models such as the TAM (Venkatesh, Morris, Davis, & Davis, 2003) or the TOE (Tornatzky & Fleischer, 1990) in greater detail. Our study did not consider any of these variables and we urge other researchers to do so.<br />
<br />
CONCLUSION This chapter presents some insights into the new trends of consumers’ behavior in mobile markets<br />
<br />
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<br />
and offers some guidelines to the establishment of a long-term relationship between operators and their clients. Relationships are inherently embryonic, as a consequence of learning together over time and this applies to firms, customers, and all other exchange parties. Due to the rapid growth in technology, one of the biggest opportunities in consumer electronics over the past ten years has been mobile phones. Consumers’ acceptance and loyalty are the foundation of mobile communications success. Unlike in traditional communications, here consumers use phones for more that communication: they explore the mobile information systems (IS) and associated applications on the emotional and rational levels. Users may use a mobile communications in a mixture of contexts. At the same time, incentives such as plan rewards or fixed-plans policies may affect users’ behavior. It is critical to study the ways in which users’ perceptions and intentions are affected by the operator’s incentives and policies. A mobile pricing strategy may strongly affect consumers in numerous ways. Part of the research on consumption decisions and personal rules focuses on the impact of pricing consistency on mobile markets and we have found that consumers truly value the trade-off between price and quality. We have argued that a variety of elements is needed to augment the value and quality perceived by mobile consumers. We have also emphasized some of the traditional costs inputs in a customer relationship have to be analyzed since clients have changed their price perception and this needs to be considered in mobile operators’ strategies. From a marketing customer behavior perspective, it seems that quality of the service is a critical element in the retention of clients. Nonetheless, in this industry this dimension does not assume the relevance of other sectors, since all operators’ activities are controlled by external official entities; in the Portuguese case the number of suppliers has been reduced and service providers are sharing antennas. As pointed out by Gerpott et al. (2001)<br />
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the quality of the service in a technical sense can be considered as a hygiene dimension, adopting the classification of Herzberg’s motivator-hygiene theory. Thus, this aspect becomes baseline but not critical in the “moments of truth” of mobile service consumption. Long-term mobile communications success is likely to be consumer-driven rather than to follow technological-based models. Thus, marketers will face the challenge to provide the best technological features, in order to keep up with the competition, and at the same time to create value-add services.<br />
<br />
REFERENCES ANACOM. (2007). Cronologia das Comunicações Móveis em Portugal. Lisboa: ANACOM. Burnham, T. A., Frels, J. K., & Mahajan, V. (2003). Consumer switching costs: a typology, antecedents, and consequences. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 31(2), 109–126. doi:10.1177/0092070302250897 Chen, Z. (2003). Consumers’value perception of an e-store and its impact on e-store loyalty intention.Unpublished manuscript, Purdue. Eshghi, A., Haughton, D., & Topi, H. (2007). Determinants of customer loyalty in the wireless telecommunications industry. Telecommunications Policy, 31(2), 93–106. doi:10.1016/j. telpol.2006.12.005 Gerpott, T. J., Rams, W., & Schindler, A. (2001). Customer retention, loyalty, and satisfaction in the German mobile cellular telecommunications market. Telecommunications Policy, 25(4), 249–269. doi:10.1016/S0308-5961(00)00097-5 Gomez, B. G., Arranz, A. G., & Cillán, J. G. (2006). The role of loyalty programs in behavioral and affective loyalty. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 23(7), 387–396. doi:10.1108/07363760610712920<br />
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Hair, J., Anderson, R., Tatham, R., & Black, W. (1998). Multivariate Data Analysis. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Hu, A., & Hwang, I.-S. (2006). Measuring the Effects of Consumer Costs on Switching Intention in Taiwan Mobile Telecommunication Service. The Journal of American Academy of Business, 1, 75–85. Kim, M. K., Park, M. C., & Jeong, D. H. (2004). The effects of customer satisfaction and switching barrier on customer loyalty in Korean mobile telecommunication services. Telecommunications Policy, 28(2), 145–160. doi:10.1016/j. telpol.2003.12.003 Lee, J., & Feick, L. (2001). The impact of switching cost on the consumer satisfaction loyalty link: mobile phone service in France. Journal of Services Marketing, 63, 35–48. doi:10.1108/08876040110381463 Levesque, T. J., & McDougall, G. H. G. (2000). Service problems and recovery strategies: An experiment. Revue Canadienne des Sciences de l’Administration, 17(1), 20–37. doi:10.1111/j.1936-4490.2000.tb00204.x Lim, H., Widdows, R., & Park, J. (2006). Mloyalty: winning strategies for mobile carriers. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 23, 208–218. doi:10.1108/07363760610674338 Lin, H., & Wang, Y. (2006). An examination of the determinants of customer loyalty in mobile commerce contexts. Information & Management, 43, 271–282. doi:10.1016/j.im.2005.08.001 Malhotra, N., & Birks, D. (2007). Marketing Research: An Applied Approach (3 rd ed.). Harlow: Prentice Hall. Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V. A., & Berry, L. L. (1985). A Conceptual Model of Service Quality and Its Implications for Future Research. The Journal of Marketing, 49(4 (Autumn)), 41-50<br />
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Pura, M. (2005). Linking perceived value and loyalty in location-based mobile services. Managing Service Quality, 5(6), 509–539. doi:10.1108/09604520510634005 Ranganathan, C., Seo, D. B., & Babad, Y. (2006). Switching behavior of mobile users: do users relational investments and demographics matter? European Journal of Information Systems, 15(3), 269–276. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ejis.3000616 Shin, D. H., & Kim, W. Y. (2007). Mobile number portability on customer switching behavior: in the case of the Korean mobile market. Information & Management, 9(4), 38–54. Sweeney, J. C., & Soutar, G. N. (2001). Consumer perceived value: the development of a multiple item scale. Journal of Retailing, 77(2), 203–220. doi:10.1016/S0022-4359(01)00041-0 Tornatzky, L., & Fleischer, M. (1990). The Processes of Technological Innovation. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Union, I. T. (2009). Media Statistics: Mobile phone subscribers (most recent) by country. NationMaster. Venkatesh, V., Morris, M. G., Davis, G. B., & Davis, F. D. (2003). User acceptance of information technology: Toward a unified view. Management Information Systems Quarterly, 27(3), 425–478. Zeithaml, V. A., Parasuraman, A., & Malhotra, A. (2002). Service quality delivery through web sites: a critical review of extant knowledge. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 30(4), 362–375. doi:10.1177/009207002236911<br />
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Customer Loyalty: Can be defined as the feelings or attitudes that dispose consistently a customer to consider the re-purchase of a particu-<br />
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lar service package and stay linkage to a specific mobile provider. Mobile Loyalty: Determined by a number of factors including mobile service quality, relationship strength, perceived alternatives and critical episodes. Satisfaction: Refers to the degree to which customer expectations of a service or product are met or exceeded by the provider. Mobile Market: Involves all consumption intervenient based on mobile phones use, such as<br />
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the equipment and telecommunications systems providers and the mobile phone users. Switching Costs: Congregates all the costs incurred when a customer changes from one mobile service provider to another. Economic Value: Refers to the trade-off between the economic benefits perceived and the financial costs from the service. Emotional Value: Consists in the value gain from clients’ feelings or emotional states when adopting and using a service.<br />
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Chapter 22<br />
<br />
Mobile Agents:<br />
<br />
Concepts and Technologies Agostino Poggi Università degli Studi di Parma, Italy Michele Tomaiuolo Università degli Studi di Parma, Italy<br />
<br />
ABSTRACT Current technological advances and the increasing diffusion of its use for scientific, financial and social activities, make Internet the de facto platform for providing worldwide distributed data storage, distributed computing and communication. It creates new opportunities for the development of new kinds of applications, but it will also create several challenges in managing the information distributed on the Internet and in guaranteeing its “on-time” access through the network infrastructures that realize the Internet. Many researchers believed and still believe that the mobile agents could propose several attractive solutions to deal with such challenges and problems. This chapter presents the core concepts of mobile agents, and attempts to provide a clear idea of the possibility of their use by introducing the problems they cope with, the application areas where they provide advantages with respect to other technologies and the available mobile agent technologies.<br />
<br />
INTRODUCTION Mobile agents are autonomous software entities with the capability of dynamically changing their execution environments in a network-aware fashion and roaming through network nodes to carry out tasks on behalf of users (Cabri et al., 2000; Chess et al., 1997; Fuggetta et al., 1998; Karnik & Tripathi, 1998; Spyrou, 2004; Braun, & DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch022<br />
<br />
Rossak, 2005). In this way, mobile agent systems constitute a middleware supporting distributed and dynamic applications based on mobile agents. The main advantage of mobile agents is that they can significantly save bandwidth, by moving locally to the resources they need and by carrying the code to manage them. Moreover, mobile agents can deal with non-continuous network connection, and as a consequence they intrinsically suit mobile computing systems. Due to these features, they have been considered and are still considered<br />
<br />
Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.<br />
<br />
Mobile Agents<br />
<br />
as an enabling technology for mobile, wireless and pervasive computing and a possible means for coping with the challenges in managing the information distributed on the Internet and in guaranteeing its “on-time” access through the network infrastructures that realize the Internet. This chapter has the goal of giving a complete introduction on mobile agents. In particular, it presents the core concepts of mobile agents and attempts to provide a clear idea of the possibility of their use by introducing the problems they cope with, the application areas where they provide advantages with respect to other technologies and the available mobile agent technologies.<br />
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BACKGROUND The ideas and the work that contributed to the development of mobile agent technologies came from network based computing, distributed operating systems and multi-agent systems. In fact, the idea of dispatching a program for execution on a remote computer is quite old. Usually, the motivation has been either that the local computer did not have the capacity to execute the program or that the remote computer had direct access to some resource such as an attached peripheral that cannot be efficiently exported via the network. Initially, such schemes were employed both to enable low power computers to submit batch jobs on mainframes (Boggs, 1973) and to control printers (Press, 1985), then some executable scripts were dispatched among networks of computers to permit distributed real time processing (Crowley-Milling et al., 1974; Ousterhout, 1994). An additional step towards mobile agents was fostered by the research done in the distributed operating systems area to support the migration of active processes and objects along with their state and associated code at the operating system level with the goal of improving the load balancing across network nodes (Jul<br />
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et al., 1988; Douglas & Ousterhout, 1991; Thiel, 1991; Lea et al., 1993). Agent, software agent and multi-agent system are terms that have found their way into a number of technologies and have been largely used, for example, in artificial intelligence, databases, operating systems and computer networks literature. Although no universally accepted definition of the term agent exists (Genesereth & Ketchpel, 1994; Wooldridge & Jennings, 1995; Russell & Norvig, 2003), the different definitions allow distinguishing between the features that all the agents should own and the features that some special kinds of agents should provide. In particular, an agent should be autonomous, because it should operate without the direct intervention of humans or others and should have control over its actions and internal state; it should be social, because it should cooperate with humans or other agents in order to achieve its tasks; it should be reactive, because it should perceive its environment and respond in a timely fashion to changes that occur in the environment; it should be pro-active, because it should not simply act in response to its environment, but should be able to exhibit goal-directed behaviour by taking the initiative. Moreover, if necessary, an agent can be mobile, showing the ability to travel between different nodes in a computer network; it can be truthful, providing the certainty that it will not deliberately communicate false information; it can be benevolent, always trying to perform what is asked to it; it can be rational, always acting in order to achieve its goals, and never to prevent its goals being achieved; it can learn, adapting itself to fit its environment and to the desires of its users.<br />
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MOBILE AGENTS A mobile agent is a program which represents a user in a computer network and is capable of migrating autonomously from node to node to perform some computation on behalf of the user.<br />
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Its tasks are determined by the agent application and can range from online shopping to real-time device control to distributed scientific computing. Applications can inject mobile agents into a network allowing them to roam the network either on a predetermined path, or one that the agents themselves determine based on dynamically gathered information. Having accomplished their goals, the agents may return to their home site in order to report their results to the user (Chess et al., 1997; Fuggetta et al., 1998; Karnik & Tripathi, 1998; Braun, & Rossak, 2005). The main characteristic of mobile agents is their ability to autonomously migrate from a machine to another machine, thus support for agent mobility is a fundamental requirement of the agent infrastructure. An agent can request its server to transport it to some remote destination. The agent server must then deactivate the agent, capture its state and transmit it to the server at the remote machine. The destination server must restore the agent state and reactivate it, thus completing the migration. The state of an agent includes all its data, as well as the execution state of its thread. The execution state is completely represented by its execution context and call stack. If this can be captured and transmitted along with the agent, the destination server can reactivate the thread at the precise point where it requested the migration (this is usually referred to as strong mobility). If the complete execution state cannot be captured and transmitted, the execution state is represented at a higher level in terms of application-defined agent data and the agent code can then direct the control flow appropriately when the state is restored at the destination (this is usually referred to as weak mobility). However, this only captures execution state at a coarse granularity, (e.g., function-level), in contrast to the instruction-level state provided by the thread context. Most agent systems execute agents using commonly available virtual machines or language environments, which do not usually allow to capture<br />
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the thread-level state. The agent system developer could modify these virtual machines for this purpose, but this renders the system incompatible with standard installations of those virtual machines. Since mobile agents are autonomous, migration only occurs under explicit programmer control, and thus state capture at arbitrary points is usually unnecessary. Most current systems therefore rely on the possibility to capture only coarsegrained execution state, to maintain portability. For example, in Java it is possible to implement a weak mobility by means of serialising objects and sending them to another Java virtual machine via socket or RMI (Kiniry, J. & Zimmermann, 1997; Ahern & Yoshida, 2005, Bellifemine et al., 2008). Otherwise, to implement a strong mobility of Java threads, it is necessary to modify the JVM code, in order to extract the Java stack and the program counter of the thread to be moved (Suri et al., 2000; Cabri et al., 2006). Another issue in implementing agent mobility is the transfer of agent code. One possibility is for agents to carry all their code as they migrate (this is usually referred to as remote evaluation). This allows agents to run on any server which can execute the code. Another possibility is for agents to migrate without any code and require to have their code available on the destination server too. Finally, the third possibility is that agents do not carry any code, but contain a reference to their code base - a server that provides their code upon request. During the execution of an agent, if it needs to use some code that is not already installed on its current server, the server can contact the code base and download the required code (this is usually referred to as code-on-demand). One of the most important problems of mobile agents is that their introduction in a network raises several security issues (Schelderup & Ølnes, 1999; Jansen, 2000; Borselius, 2002; Pridgen & Julien, 2006). In a completely closed local area network, owned by a unique organization, it is possible to trust all machines and the software installed on them. Users may be willing to allow arbitrary<br />
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mobile agents to execute on their machines, and their mobile agents to execute on arbitrary machines. However, in an open network such as the Internet, it is entirely possible that mobile agents and servers belong to different administrative domains. In such cases, they have much lower levels of mutual trust and so, servers are exposed to the risk of hosting malicious agents and agents are exposed to the risk of being hosted by malicious servers and of cooperating with malicious agents. In fact, on the one hand, a malicious agent can try: i) to claim the identity of another agent to take advantage of its privileges, ii) to launch denial of service attacks, for example, by consuming an excessive amount of the computing resources of the server or repeatedly sending messages to another agent, iii) to discover a security hole for obtaining services and resources for which it has not been granted permission and privileges as specified by a security policy, and iv) to falsely repudiate a transaction or a communication claiming that it never took place. On the other hand, a malicious server can try: i) to masquerade as another server in an effort to deceive an agent as to its true destination and corresponding security domain, ii) to launch denial of service attacks, for example, by ignoring agent service requests, by introducing unacceptable delays for critical tasks, by simply not executing the code of the agent, or even by terminating the agent without notification, iii) to get information about proprietary algorithms, trade secrets, negotiation strategies and other sensitive information, by monitoring the instructions executed by the agent and its communication with the other agents, and iv) to modify the code, state and data of an agent. The first step to cope with these security issues is to take advantage of many conventional security techniques used in contemporary distributed applications that also have utility as countermeasures within the mobile agent systems. Then there are a number of extensions to conventional techniques and techniques devised specifically for controlling mobile code that are applicable to mobile agent<br />
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security. In particular, the basic mechanism to support security in mobile agent systems is identification: every agent must be identified as coming from a user and must be authenticated to grant that its identity is true. However the identification and the following authentication do not avoid damages in the server where the agent is running, but permit to identify the responsible of such damages. To reduce such damages, a security policy can be used for isolating agents and for preventing them from doing everything, but exploiting only few resources. For example, an Access Control List (ACL) can be used to decide who can do what on which resources. Cryptographic mechanisms can be used to guarantee privacy and integrity to the agents moving from the servers of a network. If fact, it provides a secure communication between agents and their home servers, it allows servers to transport agents safely across untrusted networks and can be used to detect any tampering of agent code.<br />
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Benefits of Using Mobile Agents The interest in mobile agents is mainly motivated by the benefits that they can provide in the realization of distributed systems. There are several papers discussing about such benefits (see, for example, Chess et al., 1997; Fuggetta et al., 1998; Karnik, & Tripathi, 1998; Lange & Oshima, 1999); even if each of them presents a different list of benefits and justifies the reasons for which mobile agents offer such benefits in a different way, however it is possible to justify the advantage of using mobile agents by introducing and discussing just three of them: network traffic and latency reduction, applications and services adaption and customization, distributed systems robustness and fault-tolerance. In a distributed client-server application, there are typically several interactions between a client and a server in order to perform even a simple transaction and so there is a lot of network traffic. Mobile agents allow to package a conversation<br />
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and dispatch it to a destination server where interactions take place locally. Mobile agents are also useful when reducing the flow of raw data in the network. When very large volumes of data are stored at remote servers, that data should be processed in its locality rather than transferred over the network. In other cases, such as in manufacturing processes, systems need to respond in real time to changes in their environments. Controlling such systems through a central controller involves significant latencies that might be not acceptable. Mobile agents offer a solution, because they can be dispatched from the central controller to act locally and execute the controller’s directions directly. In a traditional distributed system, each server owns the code that implements the protocols needed to properly code outgoing data and interpret incoming data. However, as protocols evolve to accommodate new requirements for efficiency or security, it is cumbersome if not impossible to upgrade protocol code properly. As a result, protocols often become a legacy problem. Mobile agents, on the other hand, can move to a server to establish channels based on proprietary protocols. Therefore, mobile agents help to increase server flexibility without affecting permanently the size or complexity of its software: the server provides very simple and low-level services that seldom need to be changed and these services can be composed by the client through a mobile agent to obtain a customized high-level functionality that meets the specific client’s needs. The ability of mobile agents to react dynamically to unfavourable situations and events makes it easier to build robust and fault-tolerant distributed systems. If a node is being shut down, all agents executing on that machine are warned and given time to dispatch and continue their operation on another host in the network. Moreover, some distributed systems rely on expensive or fragile network connections. In these cases, tasks requiring a continuously open connection between a client and a server of the system are probably not economically or technically feasible. To<br />
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solve this problem, tasks can be embedded into mobile agents, which can then be dispatched by the client to the server. After being dispatched, the agents become independent from the process that created them and can operate asynchronously and autonomously in the server. Finally, the client can reconnect at a later time to collect the agent.<br />
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Application Areas As we discussed above, the advantage of using mobile agents is evident when an application is based on remote and complex interactions among programs and, eventually, humans, and rely on some particular communication and computation constraints. Therefore, is it easy to identify the application areas where mobile agents have potential advantages to the traditional technologies, for example, e-commerce, distributed information retrieval and dissemination, workflow management and cooperation, network management and telecommunication services and remote device control and configuration. Mobile agents are well suited for e-commerce (Dasgupta et al., 1999; Maes et al., 1999; Du et al.,2005; Fasli, 2007). In fact, the application environment is composed of several independent and possibly competing business entities. A transaction may involve negotiation with remote entities and may require access to information that is continuously evolving. In this context, there is the need to customize the behaviour of the parties involved, in order to match a particular negotiation protocol. Moreover, it is desirable to move application components close to the information relevant to the transaction. Distributed information retrieval applications gather information matching some specified criteria from a set of information sources dispersed in the network. The information sources to be visited can be defined statically or determined dynamically during the retrieval process. This is a wide application domain encompassing very diverse applications. For instance, the informa-<br />
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tion to be retrieved might range from the list of all the publications of a given author to the software configuration of hosts in a network. Mobile agents could improve efficiency by migrating the code that performs the search process close to the possibly huge information base to be analyzed (Klusch, 2001; Glitho et al., 2003). In fact, instead of moving large amounts of data to the search engine, mobile agents can be dispatched to remote information sources, where they locally create search indexes, and then be shipped back to the system of origin. Mobile agents embody the so-called Internet push model. Therefore, mobile agents can be used for disseminating information and for automatic updating of the software (Hofmann et al., 1998). While in the first case, mobile agents are able to disseminate information by accessing or building users’ profiles; in the second case, mobile agents need to have access to the new software components, as well as the installation procedures, and then are able to move to customers’ computers where they autonomously update and manage the software. Moreover, mobile agents are useful in active documents applications. Traditionally passive data, like e-mail or Web pages, are enhanced with the capability of executing programs which are somewhat related with the document contents, enabling enhanced presentation and interaction. In fact, mobile agents enable the embedding of code and state into documents and supports the execution of the dynamic contents during document fruition. Workflow management applications support the cooperation of persons and tools involved in an engineering or business process (Merz et al., 1997; Loke & Zaslavsky 2001, Fukuda, 2006). The workflow defines which activities must be carried out to accomplish a given task as well as how, where, and when these activities involve each party. A way to model this is to represent activities as autonomous entities that, during their evolution, are circulated among the entities involved in the workflow. Mobile agents could be used to provide support for mobility of activities that en-<br />
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capsulate their definition and state. For example, a mobile agent could encapsulate a text document that undergoes several revisions. The component maintains information about the document state, the legal operations on its contents and the next scheduled step in the revision process. Management, accounting and customization of advanced telecommunication services like video conference, video on demand, or mobile user support, require a specialized middleware, providing mechanisms for dynamic reconfiguration and user customization benefits provided by mobile agents (Bieszczad, 1998; Satoh, 2006). For example, the application components managing the setup, signalling and presentation services for a video conference could be dispatched to the users by a service broker. Moreover, mobile agents can be useful in the so called active networks (Tennenhouse & Wetherall, 2007). Active networks has been proposed recently as a means to introduce flexibility into networks and provide more powerful mechanisms to program the network according to applications needs (Tennenhouse et al., 1997; Tennenhouse, 2000). Such network can be based either on programmable switches that can be dynamically extended by the code provided through mobile agents or the use of active packed owing some code describing a computation that must be performed on packet data at each node. Important tasks of critical applications, like industrial process control, are the configuration of a network of devices and the monitoring of their status. In the traditional approach, configuration is performed using a predefined set of services and monitoring is achieved by polling periodically the resource state. This approach, based on the client-server paradigm, can lead to a number of problems (Yemini, 1993). Mobile agents, can be used to cope with these problem and, in particular, to improve both performance and flexibility, by realizing monitoring components that are collocated with the devices being monitored and report events that represent the evolution of the device state (Fletcher et al., 2003; Huang et al., 2007).<br />
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Mobile Agent Technologies A number of frameworks for the development of mobile agent systems is available. During the years, some features have become a common base for most frameworks. Yet, each framework has some specific characteristic making it preferable over other technologies. On the other side, new developments are mainly motivated by lack of needed features, or an unsatisfying level of modularity and extensibility in existing frameworks. In the following paragraphs, some of the most known and widespread mobile agent technologies will be analyzed, starting from pioneering technologies appeared in the 1990s, but also including the most recent ones. Telescript (Dömel, 1996) was probably the first mobile agent systems to appear, released by General Magic as result of a project started inside Apple in 1990. However, being based on a proprietary language and facing the growing popularity of Internet and Java, it loosed appeal and had short life. After the decline of Telescript, General Magic developed a new agent system based on Java, Odissey, which inherited some of the features of Telescript. Telescript is essentially an interpreted object-oriented language, supporting multiple inheritance and providing an execution environment with pre-emptive multi-tasking. One of the more interesting features of Telescript is the migration of processes. Instances of the Agent class, a subclass of Process, have a “go” method allowing them to move into a new, possibly remote, location. On the other hand, instances of the Place class, another subclass of Process, are stationary and represent the locations which could host agents. Agents are able to exploit services provided by their hosting place. Security is dealt with at 4 levels: protection of objects during execution, protection of processes, protection of the system, network security. Agent Tcl (Gray, 1996) is one of the very first projects for mobile agents. It was started in 1995 at Dartmouth College. In the first releases, agents<br />
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could be developed only as Tcl scripts. The Tcl language was augmented to allow the safe execution of scripts, which run in a sort of sandbox. Permissions were granted according to an access control list, on the basis of the source host of any arriving agent. The execution environment also allowed to capture the status of a thread, thus providing transparent migration. If needed, the environment could exploit cryptographic primitives provided by an external program like PGP, for example for encrypting and signing the code and data of mobile agents. In all cases, agent scripts had no access to those primitives. Different schemes of communication were provided, including messaging and signalling. After introducing support for multiple languages (including Tcl, Java and Scheme), it was later renamed as D’Agent. It is no longer maintained since 2003. Aglets (Lange et al., 1997) were developed and released as an open source system by IBM. Actually, no development occurred after 2001. Agents (called aglets) are able to migrate between remote hosts (called contexts). One of the distinguishing features of the system is the adoption of a callback programming model. Developed as an extension of the concept of applets (hence the name, which is a fusion of the terms “agent” and “applet”), aglets are provided with overridable methods which are invoked by the system when certain events occur, for example before and after an aglet is transferred to a different host. Agent migration is implemented on top of Java serialization mechanisms and without saving thread status. Location transparency is allowed by proxies and no direct relation is allowed between two aglets, which can cooperate only by means of asynchronous messages. Also security is engineered as a generalization of the applet model, allowing authorizations to be defined at 4 different levels: agent manufacturer, aglet owner, context master, domain authority. Ara (Peine & Stolpmann, 1997) is a platform for mobile agents, available in different languages: Java, Tcl and C++. It allows agents to migrate<br />
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in a transparent way, preserving their internal execution status. The model is based on mobile agents which are hosted on different locations. The hosting location can impose security bounds to its agents and can provide them with some services. Services are available only for agents running on the same location. The security model of Ara has a reduced number of principals, in respect to Aglets. Authorization is centred on the notion of an agent “passport”. It contains all relevant information about the agent: identity, owner, author. Moreover, it contains the maximum allowance granted to the agent, i.e. the maximum number of resources it is allowed to consume. It is signed at the creation of the agent and it is immutable during its whole lifecycle. TACOMA (Johansen et al., 1996) was developed as a collaboration between the universities of Tromso and Cornell. Agents are to be written in Tcl but can include scripts in other languages. A so-called “briefcase” contains the code of the agent and can be transferred to a remote host by means of the “meet” primitive. An agent, able to run the code in the briefcase, must be available on the destination host. The thread status is not captured by the system, so the agent code is restarted at the destination host. The system provides both synchronous and asynchronous message passing mechanisms. Security mechanisms are not implemented, even if it’s possible to use a rear-guard agent to monitor the execution and migration of other agents. JADE (Bellifemine et al., 2008) project was started in 1998 by Telecom Italia Labs in collaboration with the University of Parma. In 2000 it was released under an open-source license and currently is one of the most widespread agent frameworks adhering to FIPA specifications. Each agent, the main abstraction in the framework, is associated with its own thread of execution, but can execute different tasks implemented as behaviours and managed by an internal scheduler. JADE provides various graphical tools for monitoring and managing the platform, its agents<br />
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and the messages they exchange. Moreover, it can be extended through a number of pluggable modules, developed by different organizations and individuals, forming the lively and helpful Jade community. A JADE platform can be distributed over several machines, each one running a socalled “agent container”. Intra-platform mobility is supported natively by JADE, through the Agent Mobility Service, i.e. agents can move from one container to another remote container inside the same platform. Inter-platform mobility is made possible by a plug-in developed at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Other popular plug-ins provide authentication, authorization and confidentiality mechanisms, or integration with rule-based engine like Jess and Drools. Voyager (Glass, 1998). The development of Voyager was started in 1997 by ObjectSpace and prosecuted by Recursion Software. Currently the system is distributed with a commercial license. Voyager simplifies the development of mobile agent systems using CORBA and RMI standards to create proxies and invoke methods on remote objects. In Voyager, remote method invocation is the main mechanism allowing agents to communicate. Chains of proxies can be created to provide location transparency, when needed. Grasshopper (Baumer & Magedanz, 1999) is a framework for mobile agents developed in compliance with FIPA and MASIF standards. Its development was started in 1999 by IKV++. Agents can associate particular methods with some events in their lifecycle, e.g. after the relocation to a remote host. A Grasshopper system can be composed of multiple regions, which are used for the creation of dynamic proxies. It includes graphical tools for analyzing and managing agents and their hosting regions. The system has known limitations in the implementation of some functionalities and is no more under development. Tryllian (Karman, 2001). The development of Tryllian was started in 2001 and it was released as open source in 2003. Each agent in Tryllian is associated with a single thread, is structured<br />
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internally according to a task model and communicates with other agents through asynchronous message passing. In particular it adheres to FIPA standards. Agents can be developed with both reactive and proactive behaviours, as the system provides both message handling events and socalled heartbeat events. Overall, the development and the management of a Tryllian system can be quite complex, as task-based development in Tryllian requires a careful approach and its many features may require to be configured extensively during the deployment phase. Tracy (Braun & Rossak, 2005). The development of Tracy is quite recent, carried on by the University of Jena, Germany. However, development, discussion and documentation activities on the mailing lists, forum etc. seem quite slow at this moment. Probably the most distinguishing feature of Tracy is its very lightweight core and the availability of a number of plug-ins to provide all other services, including different mechanisms for mobility, communication, security etc. Another feature of Tracy, or rather its main limitation, is the communication being confined inside a single host. An agent, to communicate with other remote agents, has to move to their hosting node first. SPRINGS (Ilarri, 2006) is one of the most recent frameworks for mobile agents, being under active development at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. Systems based on SPRINGS are organized in regions and use dynamic proxies to assure location transparency to agents. Its development is focused on reliability and scalability, with encouraging results being shown in some tests, above all when the number and activity level of mobile agents grow. Other features, instead, can be considered still immature, e.g. it lacks security mechanisms, it does not support FIPA standard about message languages and interaction protocols, it does not provide any graphical tool for management and monitoring and the available documentation is still quite limited. Concordia (Mitsubishi, 1997). The development of Concordia was started around 1997<br />
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by Mitsubishi Electric. Concordia is a system for the development of mobile agents based on Java. It uses Java serialization and class loading mechanisms to move agents, without capturing the thread status. Each agent can be configured with an itinerary, listing the hosts that have to be visited, as well as the methods that have to be executed at each hop. Cryptography is used to protect agent code and status from alteration while saved in persistent stores and during transit over networks. Mechanisms can be deployed to recover agents, to increase reliability. Each agent is associated with a user, responsible for its actions. Authorization for accessing resources is granted according to an access control list, on the basis of the agent owner, represented by his hashed password which is always carried by the agent itself. Concordia agents can communicate by means of simple asynchronous signals and more complex protocols for group collaboration. Ajanta (Karnik & Tripathi 1998) is a framework for the development of mobile agent systems based on Java. The first available beta was released in 1999 by the University of Minnesota. After 2003, when the 2.0 version was released, no official update was made available. Like similar Java-based frameworks, Ajanta leverages on the serialization and class loading mechanisms of the language, and is not able to capture the thread status. Code and status of agents are encrypted and signed through public key cryptography during the transmission between two remote hosts. Ajanta provides a secure name service which can be used to map location-independent names to network addresses. Agents are executed in their own protection domain and associated with their own set of permissions for accessing resources. Communication between remote agents is implemented as method invocation through intermediate proxies. Ajanta is one of the mobile agent systems which deals with the threats posed to agents by malicious hosts, implementing mechanism to detect tampering and to keep some internal data confidential.<br />
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FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS<br />
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REFERENCES<br />
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Even if several research projects and applications have been realized on mobile agents and a lot people is working on them, nowadays they are still considered an immature technology both for the limited diffusion of applications based on mobile agents and for the security problems that must be solved when they are used. One of the main criticism is that neither a killer application nor a pressing need to realize systems taking advantage of mobile agents has been identified, given that they do not provide solutions to problems that are otherwise unsolvable; but they simply seem to provide a good framework in which to solve certain problems. Moreover, another frequent explanation why mobile agents have not yet been adopted is their inherent security risks: first, malicious hosts may tamper with agents, and second, malicious agents may attack their hosts. However, the advantage of their use in some application area is evident and will be feasible if the security risks will be removed. It will be probably achieved in the next years through the results of the research on security and mobile code, but it is now possible by constraining the use of mobile agents. In fact, the security risks are mainly due to the idea of open world associated with mobile agent applications: the mobile agents are realized and/or owned by different people, they move on the Internet between different servers realized and/or owned by different people. Therefore, in the next years researchers should avoid to present mobile agents as entities living in an open world and identify the contexts where they can show the advantages of their use without incurring in the usual security risks. Two general contexts where it can happen are: a service provider makes available to its user a set of customizable agents for getting its services, and an organization uses mobile agents among its machines for realizing advanced services (e.g., information diffusion, workflow management and remote device control and configuration).<br />
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KEYTERMS AND DEFINITIONS Access Control List: An Access Control List (ACL) is a list of permissions attached to a resource that specifies which users or system processes are granted access to such a resource. Killer Application: A killer application is an application that can prove the core value of some technology. Multi-Agent System: A multi-agent system (MAS) is a loosely coupled network of software agents that interact to solve problems that are beyond the individual capacities or knowledge of each software agent. Mobile Agent: A mobile agent is an active process able to decide to transport its state from a machine to another machine where it will continue its activity. Process Migration: Process migration is the act of transferring a process between two machines. Strong Mobility: Strong mobility is the ability of a mobile agent system to allow the migration of both the code and the complete execution state of an agent. Weak Mobility: Weak mobility is the ability of a mobile agent system to allow the migration of the code of an agent without the complete execution and to restart the execution of such an agent through some initialization data.<br />
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Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks Daniel Câmara EURECOM Sophia Antipolis, France Nikolaos Frangiadakis University of Maryland, USA Fethi Filali QU Wireless Innovations Center, Qatar Christian Bonnet EURECOM Sophia Antipolis, France<br />
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ABSTRACT Traditional networks suppose the existence of some path between endpoints, small end to end round-trip Delay time, and loss ratio. Today, however, new applications, environments and types of devices are challenging these assumptions. In Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), an end-to-end path from source to destination may not exist. Nodes may connect and exchange information in an opportunistic way. This book chapter presents a broad overview of DTNs, particularly focusing on Vehicular DTNs, their main characteristics, challenges, and research projects on this field. In the near future, cars are expected to be equipped with devices that will allow them to communicate wirelessly. However, there will be strict restrictions to the duration of their connections with other vehicles, whereas the conditions of their links will greatly vary; DTNs present an attractive solution. Therefore, VDTNs constitute an attractive research field.<br />
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INTRODUCTION Delay Tolerant Networking, sometime referred to as Disruption Tolerant (DTN), has been developed as an approach to building architecture DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch023<br />
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models tolerant to long delays and/or disconnected network partitions in the delivery of data to destinations. In this chapter, we will study the characteristics of these architectures, and many of the protocols developed to ensure packet delivery in these networks. We henceforth use DTN to refer<br />
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to both Delay Tolerant Networking and Disruption Tolerant Networks. For Vehicular DTN, the acronym VDTN is used. The vehicular network research field, and in extent the VDTN research field, have attracted great attention in the last few years. Initiatives such as i2010 Intelligent Car Initiative Intelligent Car (2009) aim to decrease the accidents and CO2 emissions in Europe utilizing sensors and vehicleto-vehicle (V2V) communication to increase road safety. According to these projects, cars equipped with wireless devices will exchange traffic and road safety information with nearby cars and/or roadside units. According to the ETSI 102 638 technical report (ETSI TR102_638, 2009, June), the 20% of the running vehicles will have wireless communication capabilities by 2017. The same report estimates that by 2027 almost 100% of the vehicles will be equipped with communication devices. The design of the core Internet protocols is based on a number of assumptions, including the existence of some path between endpoints, small end to end round-trip delay time, and the perception of packet switching as the right abstraction for end-to-end communications. Furthermore, the efficiency of these protocols is based on assumptions about the resources available to the nodes and the properties of the links between them. Traditionally nodes are considered to be fixed, energy unconstraint, connected by low loss rate links, and communication occurs due to the exchange of data between two or more nodes. Today, however, new applications, environments and types of devices are challenging these assumptions and call for new architectures and modes of node operation. Some of these challenges are intermittent and/or scheduled links, very large delays, high link error rates, diverse and/or energy constrained devices, with heterogeneous underlying network architectures and protocols in the protocol stack, and most importantly, the absence of an end-to-end path from a source to a destina-<br />
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tion. Applications that may pose such challenges include spacecrafts, planetary/interplanetary, military/tactical, disaster response, mobile sensors, vehicular environments, satellite and various forms of large scale ad hoc networks. The variety of these applications, the impossibility of having a fixed wired Internet infrastructure everywhere, and the inclusion of mobility in most of these applications, make these challenges more difficult to surmount. This often leads us to a new approach of designing networks, taking into account several constraints and characteristics, using DTN. This book chapter provides a broad view of what is DTNs, their main advantages and disadvantages as well as some of the main research subjects that involve DTNs.<br />
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BACKGROUND VDTNs have evolved from DTNs and are formed by cars and any supporting fixed nodes. Fall (2003) is one of the first authors to define DTN and discuss its potential. According to his definition, a DTN consists of a sequence of time-dependent opportunistic contacts. During these contacts, messages are forwarded from their source towards their destination. This is illustrated in Figure 1, in the first contact the origin sends the message to A in time t1, then A holds the message until it delivers to the destination in the contact at time t2. Contacts are characterized by their start and end times, capacity, latency, end points and direction. The routing algorithm can use these pieces of information to decide the most appropriate route(s) to deliver a message from its source to its destination. However, routing in a network where the edges among the mobile nodes depend on time signifies is not a straightforward task. One needs to find an effective route, both in time and space. All nodes along the path should consider the nodes movement pattern and the possible communication opportunities for message for-<br />
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warding. Unfortunately, it is not always easy to determine future communication opportunities or even forecast the mobility patterns of the nodes in the network. Cerf et al. (2007) characterizes contacts as: • • <br />
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Persistent: When they are always available, i.e. a Cable modem On-Demand: When they require an action to start, but after that they work as persistent contacts. For example, a dial-up connection. Intermittent scheduled: When the parts agree to meet at a specific location for a determined period of time, i.e., low earth satellite communication window. Intermittent opportunistic:Contacts that occur unexpectedly, for example, a car passing by in a non scheduled manner. Intermittent predicted: When the contacts are not based on a schedule, but on predictions. A prediction is a contact that is likely to happen, based on the history or other kind of information. However, there are no guarantees predicted contacts will actually happen. For example, when people are commuting to work, it probable that at the same time the same contacts are available, because people normally go at the same time, take the same routes.<br />
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Forwarding and routing strategies may vary significantly according to the type of contacts a node, or a network, is expected to encounter. In the case of a DTN with intermittent contact opportunities, the main priority is to maximize the probability of message delivery, and to minimize the end-to-end delay. For networks with more stable and consistent contact opportunities, it is important to discover an efficient path while trying to save as much as possible of the network resources. On a scenario with deterministic message routing and persistent, on-demand or intermittent<br />
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but scheduled contacts, we may have a chance to achieve optimal performance of the network and manage efficiently the available recourses, i.e. spectrum and node energy. However, under unpredictable intermittent network conditions, where the mobility obscures present and future topology, nodes can only forward packets randomly based on the likelihood they will eventually arrive to their destination. Then, the problem of delivering messages to their final destination is paramount and dominates that of resources utilization. In this case, flooding or epidemic message forwarding are popular approaches. Between the two extremes, deterministic contacts and fully opportunistic ones, a broad range of strategies may be used to balance message delivery and resource optimization. Another issue to keep in mind is the duration and bandwidth of contacts. In a vehicular network, the number of contacts may be high, but the duration of each one should often be expected to last only seconds, especially between cars moving in opposite lanes. This significantly limits the amount of information exchanged among nodes. In 2002 the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), (IRTF, 2009), started a new group called Delay-Tolerant Networking Research Group (DTNRG), (DTNRG, 2009). The group was first linked to the Interplanetary Internet Research Group (IPNRG), (IPNRG, 2009), however, soon it became clear that the main characteristics of DTNs, i.e. non-interactive, asynchronous communication, would be useful in a broader range of situations. The main aim of IRTF is to provide architectural and protocol solutions to enable interoperation among nodes in extreme and performance challenged environments where the end-to-end connectivity may not exist. IRTF states DTNRG focuses to a wide range of application scenarios; spacecraft, military/tactical, public safety, underwater, sensor and ad-hoc networks and extremely degraded connectivity, such as country side networks, to name a few.<br />
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CHALLENGES AND TECHNIQUES The conditions of DTN operation lead to an architecture that challenges the traditional conception of most of the network layers. In this section we present some of the major challenges faced by DTN protocols at different network layers. Standard network modeling techniques are also challenged and new ways to model nodes and connections should be created to evaluate the considered protocols. Therefore this section also discusses the different network modeling, traffic modeling, transport layer issues, routing and data dissemination strategies.<br />
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Routing The challenges that Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) need to overcome have lead to significant research focused on routing. Routing is considered to be the problem of deciding forwarding strategies that enable messages to pass from the origin to the destination. The issues presented in this section pertain to most of the network layers and techniques developed for DTNs. For the case of VDTNs, store-and-forward, or store-carry-andforward techniques are used (Small, Haas, 2005). This means that the nodes which receive a message, store it for some time, possibly carry it to another location, and afterwards forward it to other nodes. In the Internet, nodes often momentarily buffer packets as well. However, this spends as sort time intervals as possible, while in DTN it is used to overcome absence of end-to-end connectivity, as well as a mechanism to wait until efficient connections are present. Each intermediate node verifies the integrity of the message before forwarding it. In general, this technique helps us cope with intermittent connectivity, especially in the wilderness or environments requiring high mobility, and may be preferable in situations of long delays in transmission and variable or high error rates.<br />
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Mundur, & Seligman (2008), identify mainly two classes of routing algorithms for DTNs. The first class is based on epidemicrouting, in which nodes use opportunistic contact to infect other nodes with the message to be delivered. For this group, the need of network knowledge is minimal. The routing algorithms have no control of node mobility and the forwarding process occurs in a fortuitous way. The second class of algorithms utilizes topology information and the algorithms may control nodes mobility. For Mundur, & Seligman (2008), this case is characterized by “islands” of well connected nodes with intermittent connectivity with other nodes. Fall (2003) and Jain, Fall & Patra, (2004) present an interesting list of routing issues for DTNs. • <br />
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Routing objective: Although the main objective of a routing algorithm is message delivery and DTNs are, by definition, tolerant to delay, that does not mean we should not try to decrease the delay as much as possible. Algorithms should attempt to find a good tradeoff between decreasing the end-to-end delay and saving network resources. Reliability: The protocols should be reliable and provide some form of mechanism to inform the nodes that their messages reached the destination. Acknowledged message delivery is an important enhancement of the offered services. Security: In all types of networks, security is an important factor. However, in DTNs the packets may cross a diverse path to reach the destination. The reliability and intentions of often numerous intermediate nodes may not be possible to guarantee. Mechanisms to provide message authentication and privacy of the messages content are of supreme importance. Resource allocation: Normally the main routing objectives of maximizing the message delivery ratio and minimize resource<br />
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allocation are conflicting. The easiest way to guarantee the message delivery in the smallest amount of time is flooding the network with the message. However, this means a high use of network bandwidth, nodes memory and processing power. These may lead to other problems such as packet collisions, packet drops because full message queues and surely the waist of the limited amount of energy of the nodes. Buffer space: Considering the disconnection problem, messages may be stored for a long period of time before they can be forwarded. The buffer space must to be enough to maintain all the pending messages, i.e. messages that did not reached their final destination yet. Contact scheduling: The forwarding waiting time is one of the principal elements on DTNs. It is not always clear how long a node will need to keep a message to enable its forwarding. This period may vary from seconds to days. Contact capacity: Not only the contacts may not always be predicted, but when they occur, they may be brief. The protocols should take this into account and try to minimize, as much as possible, the use of the spectrum and time with control messages. Energy: Mobile nodes may have limited amount of energy and, possibly, hard access to power sources. Normally, for VDTNs the energy is a factor to be kept in mind but it is not one of the main factors since the vehicle can normally provide enough energy to maintain the communication system.<br />
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To evaluate the routing algorithms for DTNs Jones (2006), and Sanchez, Franck & Beylot (2007), propose the utilization of:<br />
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Delivery ratio: Jones (2006) defines delivery ratio as “the fraction of generated messages that are correctly delivered to the final destination within a given time period” Latency: Even though the networks and applications are supposed to endure delays, many applications could take advantage of shorter delays. Even more, some application have time windows of delay resilience, i.e. messages are valid during a certain amount of time, after that the message looses its validity. Transmissions: The number of messages transmitted by the algorithms varies and some, that create multiple copies of the message, may send more messages than others. Lifetime: Route lifetime is the time a route can be used to forward packets without the need for re-computation. End-to-end delay: This evaluation criterion is the time it takes for one message to go from the origin to the destination. Capacity: Capacity is the amount of data that that may pass through one route during its lifetime Synchronicity: Even in a delay tolerant network, it is possible that, during some intervals, origin and destination are close and the communication may occur directly, or in the same way as it is in traditional wireless networks. Synchronicity, measures how long this situation where classical communication is possible. Simultaneousness: This criteria measures the contact durations. I.e. the time intermediate nodes are in the same area, Higher order simultaneousness: Simultaneousness is the computed hop-byhop. However, the same concept may be applied to a series of nodes, a k subsequent number of nodes i.e. a segment of k consecutive nodes, that are part of the complete path.<br />
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Discontinuity: is the normalized duration of packet storage thorough the path.<br />
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Recently, Shen, Moh & Chung (2008) presented a compact and interesting list of routing strategies for DTNs. Like Mundur, & Seligman (2008)Shen, Moh & Chung (2008) also divide the routing protocols in two families; flooding and forwarding. Flooding strategies are the ones where nodes create copies of the packet and forward to more than one node. Forwarding strategies use the knowledge of the network to select the best paths. A comparison between the generic behavior of flooding and forwarding strategies is depicted in Figure 2. Note that flooding strategies result in a significantly higher number of messages compared to forwarding.<br />
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Flooding Based Strategies One of the simplest possible forwarding strategies is called Direct Contact. On this strategy the node waits until the source comes into contact with the destination before forwarding the data. Jones (2006) considers direct contact as a degenerate case of a forwarding strategy. Even though this strategy does not multiply messages, it is considered flooding. The reason is that it does not make use of any topology information the nodes possess. The strategy is simple and presents low resource consumption; however, if the contact opportunities between source and destination are low, then the delivery rate can be low. On the Two hop Relay strategy (Jones, 2006), the source copies the message to the first n nodes that it contacts. These nodes relay the message until they find the destination, it is similar to the direct contact, but now not only the source keeps the message, but also n copies of the message are spread among other nodes. With this we increase the required resources, but also the expected delivery ratio. Three based flooding strategies are established. (Jones, 2006), extends even more the idea of di-<br />
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rect contact in the sense that now all nodes that receive the message may create n copies of it. The message tends to propagate through the network in a controlled flooding that resembles a three. Epidemic routing (Vahdat, & Becker, 2000), consists of the spreading of the message as it occurs in the case of a virus or an epidemic. Each node that receives the message rebroadcasts it to every other node it encounters. The contaminated nodes just keep one copy of the message. This approach is extremely effective, but often results to high resource consumption. Ramanathan, Hansen, Basu, Rosales-Hain & Krishnan (2007) present a prioritized version of the epidemic routing. This technique imposes a partial ordering on the messages based on costs to destination, source, and expiry time. The costs are derived from the link availability information. The technique successfully maintains a gradient of replication density that decreases with increasing distance from the destination. Even though it is also a resource intensive technique it presents lower costs and higher delivery rates than simple epidemic routing.<br />
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Forwarding Based Strategies Location based routing (Jones, 2006) techniques use geographical information, such as Global Positioning System (GPS) data, to forward the data. This strategy is the forwarding one that demands the smallest amount of knowledge of the network structure. With the position information they can estimate the costs and direction to forward the messages. Source routing, strategies calculate the whole path in the origin, prior than sending the packet. This kind of strategy needs to have a fairly consistent view of the network to work properly. On the other hand, on per-hop routing (Jones, 2006), the decisions of which path to take are done in a hop per hop basis when the message arrives at each hop. Instead of computing the next hop for each message the per-contact routing technique<br />
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recomputed its routing table each time a contact arrives and its knowledge of the network increases. Instead of routing with global contact knowledge, Liu & Wu (2007) propose a simplified DTN model and a hierarchical routing algorithm which routes on contact information with three combined methods.<br />
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Data Dissemination Data dissemination refers to data-centric communications protocols. The Data Mule project (Shah, Roy, Jain & Brunette, 2003) and the Message Ferrying scheme (Tariq, Ammar, Zegura, 2006), are two of the most well-known data dissemination algorithms for DTNs. They were designed for sensor networks. They propose the use of mobile nodes to collect data from the sensors, buffer it, and deliver the collected data to a sink. The MULEs (Mobile Ubiquitous LAN Extensions) and ferries utilize nodes navigating through the sensor network to collect data in ‘mobile caches’. According to the Data Mule project, all the nodes are fixed and only the cache is mobile. Message Ferrying (Tariq, Ammar, Zegura, 2006) also considers mobile nodes, but in this approach the nodes are required to follow specific paths and even move in order to help message delivering. The SPAWN protocol introduced by Das, Nandan, Pau, Sanadidi, & Gerla, (2004) and Nandan, Das, Pau, Sanadidi, & Gerla (2005) discusses how vehicles should interact to accommodate swarming protocols, such as BitTorrent traffic. In SPAWN, the nodes passing through Access Points (APs) collect data that they subsequently exchange among nearby nodes. Nodes are often required to carry traffic useless to them and the BitTorrent protocol is bandwidth intensive, however, swarming protocols is an interesting and effective way for message dissemination among nodes in VDTNs. Frangiadakis, Câmara, Filali, Loureiro & Roussopoulos (2008) propose a simple and efficient dissemination algorithm called Virtual Access<br />
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Points (VAPs). This work focuses the problem of data dissemination in Infrastructure-to-Vehicle (I2V) manner. They are interested on extending the I2V network to areas where regular access points are not deployed. When a vehicle moves near an Access Point (AP), and receives a message, this vehicle becomes responsible for re-broadcasting it over the uncovered areas. Thus, it helps to spread the messages through the network, and the mobile nodes act as Virtual Access Points for nodes on thee the regions that do not have a real AP. This behavior is exemplified in Figure 3, where node A receives a message from the AP and afterward rebroadcasts it in a non covered area. For all practical purposes there is no difference between the services provided by the AP and the VAPs. The propagation mechanism is cooperative, and a node only acts as a VAP if it is outside any AP coverage area.<br />
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Transport Issues The greatest part of the research for DTNs has focused on routing and data dissemination algorithms. However, many other aspects present interesting and valuable challenges. The transport layer is certainly one of the layers that need special attention. Most of the services offered by existing transport layer protocols, such as TCP, have been ignored. For example, end-to-end connections, sequencing, congestion control and reliability are some of the most important features of the TCP protocol. Some of these services may be easily implemented in DTNs while others will require a fairly amount of future research. We will focus here reliability approaches to ensure message delivery on the DTNs. Hop-by-hop reliability (Fall, 2003) is the most basic and simple reliability strategies to ensure data delivery on DTNs. Each time a node receives a message, it sends an acknowledgement (ACK) of it reception and after that assumes the responsibility for this message across a defined region. For this case an end-to-end ACK is not possible,<br />
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unless it is a completely new message generated by the destination. The lack of end-to-end reliability of the hopby-hop approach may be a problem for a series of applications. One of the ways to overcome this problem is the use of Active Receipt (Harras, & Almeroth, 2006). Active receipt is basically an end-to-end acknowledgment created by the destination, addressed to the source of the original message. The receipt is actively sent back through the network. In truth it is a new message that is propagated through the network. Active receipts solve the problem of end-to-end reliability but the price to pay for it may be too high in some situations. Passive Receipt (Harras, & Almeroth, 2006), is another method created to provide end-to-end reliability with a lower cost. The high price of the Active Receipt comes from the generation of two messages on the network instead of just one. To use the same term of epidemic routing, now we do have two messages infecting nodes instead of just one. In this case what Passive Receipt introduces is exactly the concept of an implicit receipt, instead of an active one. The destination, instead of creating a new active receipt, it creates an implicit kill message for the first one. The kill message works as a cure for the infected nodes, when they receive this message they know the message arrived to the destination and that they do not need to rebroadcast the original message. The message is rebroadcast only if the cured nodes met other node that is re-broadcasting the original message. The flux of message is lower than the one generated by the active receipt, and the endto-end reliability is guaranteed, since eventually the source will also receive the passive receipt. An interesting solution for the end-to-end reliability is also proposed by Harras, & Almeroth (2006) and takes advantage of the number of multiple network infrastructures available nowadays. On the Network-Bridged Receipt approach the nodes may use a different medium access mode to delivery ACKs. For example, while the cell phone network may not present the required data<br />
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rate for a specific application, or even present a high cost. The cell network may present more than reasonable bandwidth at a cost effective to send small ACK messages.<br />
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Modeling Techniques for VDTNs Analytical studies perform an important role in the evaluation and, in consequence, in the development of protocols in every area, for vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks it is not different. However, the constraints of DTNs are somehow particular, compared to traditional wired and wireless networks, the same analytical models and constraints may not hold for DTN environment. An analytical model, or study, “is a proven approach for studying system performance, revealing underlying characteristics, and evaluating communication protocols” (Wang, Dang, & Wu, 2007). Theoretical works, like the one of Niyato, Wang, & Teo (2009), provide the indication and comparison basis for other simulation or test-beds experiments. Many factors may influence the analytical results of an experiment, e.g. node density, capacity, physical and medium access control characteristics. However the three main factors are: mobility model, data delivery scheme and queue management (Wang, Dang, & Wu, 2007).<br />
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Mobility Models Different DTNs may have different mobility models and the mobility influence directly the network structure. The way nodes move, or do not move, may influence: the retransmission delays, frequency of contacts among nodes and energy decay. Mobility can either provide the chance for new high quality contact or well the break stable links already established. Different mobility model Apart from static placement of nodes, probably the simplest mobility model is the Random Walkbased model (Zonoozi, & Dassanayake, 1997). On this mobility model nodes choose random points on the space and move towards these points with<br />
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random speeds. The three basic steps for a random way point algorithm, as described by Bettstetter, Hartenstein, & Perez-Costa (2002) are: first the node chooses randomly a destination, after that the node goes in direction to that destination with a random speed, the third steps is wait for a random period of time at the destination point. Some minor variants of this process are also possible, for example Spyropoulos, Psounis, Raghavendra (2006) consider random directions instead of positions, but in the end the main concept is the same. Some well used techniques use different distributions to movement the nodes. The main advantages of using these distribution based mobility model are that, not only the mathematical model of a well known distribution is easy to implement, but also it is easy to analyze the network behavior afterwards. For example, knowing the nodes distribution is easy to calculate the probability of a node cross a specific network area. Some well used distributions are: Normal, poison and exponential. Markovian mobility models are also a popular choice to model the mobility movement. The main goal of using Markov chains is to create more realistic movement models (Chiang, 1998) (Campos, & Moraes, 2004) with real drivers actions, such the movement in the same direction and in adjacent directions, acceleration, stops and sharp turns ; it can also simulate some special actions, such as acceleration/deceleration, sharp turns, stops and sudden stops. Other model designed to provide realistic mobility patterns, introduced by Haerri, Bonnet, Filali, (2007), is Kinetic Graphs. This method tries to capture the dynamics of mobile structures and accordingly develop an efficient maintenance for them. Unlike static graphs, kinetic graphs are assumed to be continuously changing and edges are represented by time-varying weights. Kinetic graphs are a natural extension for static graphs and provide solutions to similar problems, such as convex hulls, spanning trees or connected dominating sets, but for continuously mobile<br />
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networks. This mobility model is implemented in a tool called VanetMobiSim, (Fiore, Haerri, Bonnet, Filali, 2007), that can generate realistic mobility patterns.<br />
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Delivery Schemes Direct transmission and flooding (Wang, & Wu, 2006) are two of the most simple delivery schemes possible. On direct transmission a node simply transmits the message direct to the destination. On flooding schemes the nodes transmit the message to all other nodes it may encounter. The analysis of both schemes is simple since the node behavior is straightforward to predict. Epidemic dissemination schemes are also extremely popular for VDTNs. For example, the Shared Wireless Infostation Model (SWIM) presents an epidemic Markov dissemination scheme, (Small & Haas, 2003). The scheme is further analyzed and refined in (Small & Haas, 2005). Wang, Dang, & Wu (2007) present a more diverse description of dissemination models.<br />
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Queue Management The way nodes manage their queues is also a determinant component in the de performance of algorithms for VDTNs. The way one model the queues determines, among others, the way nodes will discard old messages and this in consequence will, possibly, affect the network delivery ratio. The generic queuing analytic framework is introduced by Wang & Wu (2007) is a good start point for a simple queue model for VDTNs. The models described by Wang & Wu (2007) are infinite and finite buffer space. For the infinite buffer space the node’s queue is considered to have infinite length. For the finite buffer space it is assumed that each node may hold at most k messages on the queue. Niyato, Wang, & Teo (2009) present an analytical queuing model based on discrete time Markov chains. This work also proposes models for queue performance measures for VDTNs. The proposed<br />
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performance measures are: average number of packets in queue of a Mobile router, throughput and average packet delivery delay.<br />
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Applications One of the main focuses of research of VDTNs in the last few years have been the use of VDTNs in road safety applications. Research such as Xu, Mark, Ko & Sengupta (2004) evaluate the feasibility of using dedicated short range communication to warn vehicles about road accidents. Yang, Liu, Zhao, & Vaidya (2004) propose the use of V2V to warn vehicles about road conditions and demonstrate the potential of DTNs for real life applications.<br />
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CONCLUSION DTNs constitute a young and expanding field. VDTNs have huge potential because of the imminent appearance of vehicular devices capable of wireless communications. These will operate on a very demanding environment, with intermittent connectivity, where an end-to-end path may not always be found. Even though routing and data dissemination have been the focus of research, areas such as security, topology management, transport layer issues, and higher protocol level concerns are equally important. They present problems that will need to be addressed in the near future. DTNs and in particular VDTNs are an attractive research field exactly for the reason that to achieve the envisioned future of ubiquitous connectivity, we need a solution for these open problems.<br />
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REFERENCES Bettstetter, C., Hartenstein, H., & Perez-Costa, X. (2002). Stochastic properties of the random waypoint mobility model: epoch length, direction distribution, and cell change rate. In Proceedings of the ACM International Workshop on Modeling Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems, 7 – 14.<br />
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Burgess, J., Gallagher, B., Jensen, D., & Levine, B. (2006, April). MaxProp: Routing for Vehicle-Based Disruption-Tolerant Networks. In Proc. INFOCOM 2006, 25th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications, 1 – 11 Campos, C. A. V., & de Moraes, L. F. M. (2007). A Markovian Model Representation of Individual Mobility Scenarios in Ad Hoc Networks and Its Evaluation. EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, (1): 35–49. Cerf, V., Burleigh, S., Hooke, A., Torgerson, L., Durst, R., Scott, K., et al. (2007). Delay Tolerant Network Architecture. Retrieved from http://www. ietf.org/rfc/rfc4838.txt Chiang, C. (1998). Wireless Networks Multicasting. PhD thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles Das, S., Nandan, A., Pau, G., Sanadidi, M. Y., & Gerla, M. (2004). SPAWN: Swarming Protocols for Vehicular Ad Hoc Wireless Networks. In Proceedings of the First ACM International Workshop on Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET 2004), MOBICOM 2004. DTNRG. (2009). Delay Tolerant Networking Research Group. Retrieved 2010, from http://www. DTNrg.org/wiki European Commission, Information Society. (2009). Intelligent Car | Europa - Information Society. Retrieved 2010, from http://ec.europa. eu/information_society/activities/intelligentcar/ index_en.htm European Telecommunications Standards Institute. (2009, June). TR102_638 V1.1.1, Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS); Vehicular Communications; Basic Set of Applications; Definitions. Retrieved 2010 from http://webapp.etsi.org/workprogram/ Report_WorkItem.asp?WKI_ID=28530 Fall, K. (2003, August). A Delay-Tolerant Network Architecture for Challenged Internets. ACM SIGCOMM. In Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, 27-34. 365<br />
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Fiore, M., Haerri, J., Bonnet, C., & Filali, F. (2007, March). Vehicular mobility simulation for VANETs. In Proceedings of ANSS-40 2007, 40th IEEE Annual Simulation Symposium, Norfolk, VA. Frangiadakis, N., Câmara, D., Filali, F., Loureiro, A. A. F., & Roussopoulos, N. (2008, February). Virtual access points for vehicular networks, Mobilware 2008, 1st International Conference on MOBILe Wireless MiddleWARE, Operating Systems, and Applications, ACM. Haerri, J., Bonnet, C., & Filali, F. (2007, May). Kinetic graphs: a framework for capturing the dynamics of mobile structures in MANET, EURECOM, RR-07-195. Retrieved 2010 from http://www.eurecom.fr/util/popuppubli. en.htm?page=copyright&id=2238 Harras, K., & Almeroth, K. (2006, May). Transport Layer Issues in Delay Tolerant Mobile Networks, IFIP Networking. InterPlanetary Internet Special Interest Group. (n.d.). InterPlanetary Internet Special Interest Group. Retrieved 2010, from http://www.ipnsig. org/ IRTF-Internet Research Task Force. (n.d.). IRTFInternet Research Task Force. Retrieved October 18, 2009, from http://www.irtf.org/ Jain, S., Fall, K., & Patra, R. (2004, August). Routing in a Delay Tolerant Network, SIGCOMM, In Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, 145 – 158. Jones, E. P. C., Li, L., Schmidtke, J. K., & Ward, P. A. S. (2007, Aug.). Practical Routing in DelayTolerant Networks. Mobile Computing. IEEE Transactions on, 6(8), 943–959. Liu, C., & Wu, J. (2007, September). Scalable Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks. ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MOBIHOC), 51 – 60.<br />
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Mundur, P., & Seligman, M. (2008, May). Delay Tolerant Network Routing: Beyond Epidemic Routing, Proc. of ISWPC, 550-553. Nandan, A., Das, S., Pau, G., Sanadidi, M. Y., & Gerla, M. (2005, January). Cooperative Downloading in Vehicular Ad Hoc Wireless Networks. In Proceedings of IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Wireless On demand Network Systems and Services, 32 – 41. Niyato, D., Wang, P., & Teo, C. M. (2009, April), Performance analysis of the vehicular delay tolerant network, Proc. IEEE WCNC’09. Ramanathan, R., Hansen, R., Basu, P., RosalesHain, R., & Krishnan, R. (2007, June). Prioritized Epidemic routing for opportunistic networks. In Proceedings of the 1st international Mobisys Workshop on Mobile Opportunistic Networking, 62 – 66. Sanchez, H. C., Franck, L., & Beylot, A. (2007, Novembre). Routing metrics in Delay Tolerant Networks, Rapport de recherche, IRIT/RR--200722--FR, Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse. Retrieved 2010, from http://www.enseeiht. fr/~beylot/IRITBeylot6.pdf Shah, R., Roy, S., Jain, S., & Brunette, W. (2003). Data mules: Modeling a three tier architecture for sparse sensor networks. IEEE Sensor Network Protocols and Applications, 1(2), 215–233. Shen, J., Moh, S., & Chung, I. (2008). Routing Protocols in Delay Tolerant Networks: A Comparative Survey. The 23rd International Technical Conference on Circuits/Systems, Computers and Communications, 1577 – 1580. Retrieved 2010 from http://www.ieice.org/proceedings/ITCCSCC2008/pdf/p1577_P2-46.pdf Small, T., & Haas, Z. J. (2003). The Shared Wireless Infostation Model—A New Ad Hoc Networking Paradigm (or Where there is aWhale, there is aWay). ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MOBIHOC), 233–244. doi:10.1145/778415.778443<br />
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Small, T. & Haas, Z. J. (2005, August). Resource and Performance Tradeoffs in DelayTolerant Wireless Networks, ACM, SIGCOMM workshop on Delay Tolerant Networking and Related Topics (WDTN), pp. 260–267. doi:10.1145/1080139.1080144 Spyropoulos, T., Psounis, K., & Raghavendra, C. S. (2006). Performance analysis of mobilityassisted routing. ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MOBIHOC), 49 – 60. Tariq, M., Ammar, M., & Zegura, E. (2006, May). Message Ferry Route Design for Sparse Ad hoc Networks with Mobile Nodes, ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MOBIHOC), 37 – 48. Vahdat, A., & Becker, D. (2000). Epidemic routing for partially connected ad hoc networks, Technical Report CS-2000-06, Duke University. Retrieved 2010 from http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~vahdat/papers/epidemic.pdf Wang, Y., Dang, H. & Wu, H. (2007). A survey on analytic studies of Delay-Tolerant Mobile Sensor Networks, 7(10). Wang, Y., & Wu, H. (2006), DFT-MSN: The Delay Fault Tolerant Mobile Sensor Network for Pervasive Information Gathering. In Proc. of INFOCOM 2006, 25th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications, 1-11. Wang, Y., Wu, H., & Dang, H. (2007, September). Delay/Fault-Tolerant Mobile Sensor Network (DFT-MSN): A New Paradigm for Pervasive Information Gathering. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 6(9). doi:10.1109/TMC.2007.1006<br />
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Xu, Q., Mark, T., Ko, J., & Sengupta, R. (2004), Vehicle-to-Vehicle Safety Messaging in DSRC, in Proc. of ACM VANET, 2004, 19 – 28. Yang, X., Liu, J., Zhao, F., & Vaidya, N. (2004, August), A Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication Protocol for Cooperative Collision Warning, in Proc. of ACM MOBIQUITOUS, 114 –123. Zonoozi, M., & Dassanayake, P (1997), User Mobility Modeling and Characterization of Mobility Patterns. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 1997, 15(7)<br />
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KEY TERMS WITH DEFINITIONS Delay/Disruption Tolerant Network/Networking, DTN: opportunistic kind of network characterized by the absence of an end-to-end path from source to destination Vehicular Delay/Disruption Tolerant Network: DTNs where part / all of the participants are vehicles Routing: the process of finding where a packet or traffic flow should be directed next as to eventually move from its origin to its destination Data Dissemination: the distribution of a specific data message over the nodes in the network Epidemic Routing: a routing tactics inspired by how epidemics spread over the population Direct Contact: the direct transmission of a message between two nodes in the communication range Flooding: a simple routing algorithm in which every incoming packet is sent through every outgoing link Reliability: ensure the data delivery to the destination<br />
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Chapter 24<br />
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Monitoring the Learning Process through the use of Mobile Devices Francisco Rodríguez-Díaz University of Granada, Spain Natalia Padilla Zea University of Granada, Spain Marcelino Cabrera University of Granada, Spain<br />
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ABSTRACT Many studies defend the use of New Technologies in classrooms. It has been substantially proven that computer operation can be learnt at an early age, and that the use of new technologies can improve a child’s learning process. However, the main problem for the teacher continues to be that he/she cannot pay attention to all children at the same time. Sometimes it is necessary to decide which child must be first attended to. It is in this context that we believe our system has the ability to greatly help teachers: we have developed a learning process control system that allows teachers to determine which students have problems, how many times a child has failed, which activities they are working on and other such useful information, in order to decide how to distribute his/her time. Furthermore, bearing in mind the attention required by kindergarten students, we propose the provision of mobile devices (PDA - Personal Digital Assistant) for teachers, permitting free movement in the classroom and allowing the teacher to continue to help children while information about other students is being received. Therefore if a new problem arises the teacher is immediately notified and can act accordingly.<br />
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INTRODUCTION New Technologies have become an essential part of our lifestyle. This can be evidenced in many DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch024<br />
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different areas of our daily life: we can no longer work without our PC’s or laptops, we connect from home to office to work on-line, e-mail is the most common form of information exchange, our opinions are made public on internet forums, maps have converted into GPSs, PDAs have replaced<br />
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agendas, etc. Older generations have been witness to the origin and standardization of PC’s, laptops, PDAs, videogames, etc. and while children nowadays are completely familiar with these resources, they are often not permitted to use them. As result of this, new technologies have become an attractive field for children. Incorporating New Technologies into educational development can improve cognitive skills, the quality of time dedicated to learning, and the motivation, concentration and attention of children [NUS99, MCF02]. The learning/teaching process is interactive and both students and teachers require mutual feedback: students and teachers need to know how well progress is continuing in order to adapt the learning process to the particular needs of each student. On the one hand, students wish to know their mistakes as soon as possible, while on the other, teachers wish to know whether or not students understand the lessons. One of the most common complaints is that this feedback is usually delayed and ineffective. Although qualitative information, such as facial expressions and body language, can reveal students’ level of understanding, a more formal feedback based on quantitative measures is a better option. Our proposal aims to facilitate the work of teachers with regards to three main ideas: introducing new technologies into classrooms, providing prompt and effective feedback, and evaluating the learning process. Our system notifies the teacher of the most important events in order to reduce the time spent checking students’ activities and to increase time spent with each student. In addition, the control system we have developed focuses on assessing student performance within the application, allowing the teacher to pay more attention to student learning. It also allows the teacher a great degree of mobility thanks to the implementation of the control system via a mobile device. The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows: in the section “Background”, we discuss software tools related to that which we present in this paper; in the following section, entitled “A<br />
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system of classroom control”, we explain in detail the different elements of our system’s architecture and functioning, aspects related to the physical implementation of the system are detailed in the section “Technology”, after which we highlight our future research directions and conclusions. Finally, we have included a glossary of key terms contained in this work.<br />
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BACKGROUND There are many tools available on the market for content management and the administration of training activities within an organization. Two categories of system can be classified with regards to the physical location of students: • <br />
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LMS-LCMS. Learning Management Systems (LMS) are software applications that automate the administration, documentation, tracking, and reporting of training events. Meanwhile Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS) are multiuser environments where developers may create, store, reuse, manage, and deliver digital learning content from a central object repository. The LMS cannot create and manipulate courses; that it is to say, it cannot reuse the content of one course to build another.<br />
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These systems are designed for on-line learning, distributing courses over the Internet and offering features for on-line collaboration. The JOIN project [JOIN], dedicated to providing support to the user community of Open Source Learning platforms, can locate a compilation of available systems and their evaluation, as well as a comprehensive glossary of terms. Compared with commercial tools such as WebCT/Blackboard [WEBC], which offer a more compact and robust environment, open source<br />
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tools allow us greater flexibility and the possibility to incorporate new features adapted to user needs. • <br />
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Control Classroom Systems are tools designed for monitoring the work of students in the classroom, allowing teacher-student interaction either individually or in groups, using virtual whiteboards and controlling access to the Internet, documents and applications. Examples of these systems include NetSupport School [NETS], XClass [XCLA] and SMART [SMAR].<br />
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Our proposal falls into the second category, but incorporates additional aspects that we consider very important: it provides the teacher with mobility in the classroom, an essential factor in environments with younger children, and focuses on monitoring and evaluating the activity being undertaken, instead of classroom management<br />
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Figure 1. Teacher Decision Support Module<br />
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or educational content. In this way our system is complementary to both types presented above.<br />
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A SYSTEM OF CLASSROOM CONTROL In order to reach our goals, we have designed a system with a modular architecture and a communication protocol that allows an efficient interoperability between heterogeneous systems. Our system’s architecture is composed of four main elements (see Figure 1): • <br />
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Distributed Control Module: this is the main component of the architecture, which supports communication between the other modules. It has three main functional aspects: management of global system information, definition of parameters for learn-<br />
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ing applications and teacher decision support. The most important function as regards teacher needs is the Teacher Decision Support module, through which real time information is obtained. This is composed of three sub-modules: Problem Detector: by using data from a configuration file and data from student performance, this sub-module sends alerts to the mobile device, informing the teacher of students who are having problems. ii. Acting Module: this module allows teachers to make changes in the students’ laptops via their own. Teachers also have the possibility to start or finish an application in the students’ computers, as well as interact with their learning applications. iii. Statistics Analyser: this collects and classifies information from each student. The teacher can request these data in several ways: by student over time, by application and student, comparing students and so on. ◦⊦ Mobile Device: by using a PDA the teacher is able to move around the classroom without losing control of each child. Consequently the teacher can know: i. who is connected to the system, ii. who is running an application, iii. who is logged into the system, and iv. who may be encountering problems starting the work. ◦⊦ Children’s Laptops: based on the initiative “Escuela 2.0” proposed by the Spanish Government [BOE], we assume that every student has their own laptop. In order to connect a laptop to the control system and identify the student, it is necessary to install a small application. i. <br />
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Learning Applications: these applications allow students to work on the educational contents of each subject. Whichever software applications are used, they must satisfy our integration specifications.<br />
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The architecture allows the teacher to pay the necessary attention to each student according to the information displayed in the PDA. The architecture and its associated mobile device are particularly useful when introduced into the kindergarten or primary learning levels. Younger children require more attention and often experience more problems than older students. By using the proposed system, the teacher can focus attention on children with difficulties while also controlling the rest of the class by means of the alerts and statistics provided by the system.<br />
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Distributed Control Module As previously mentioned, the Distributed Control Module is the main element in the architecture, since it coordinates the global function of the system. It allows communication between the other modules, manages all necessary information for the smooth functioning of the system, and provides the teacher with the ability to control the learning system. All these functions are undertaken by several sub-modules that will be further explained below. The Application Configuration Management Sub-module is intended to define all configurable parameters by the teacher regarding each specific application. These means that every time students use an application the teacher can choose: • <br />
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the information he/she wishes to receive from each application. Applications designed for this system must provide a set of evaluable items from which the teacher can choose. Selected items are converted<br />
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into the alerts that the teacher receives during the execution of the application. how many repetitions of an event are needed to send an alert to the teacher. Our system sends alerts to the teacher by means of the mobile device. By using this option the teacher defines how many times an event must be repeated in order to receive an alert. Moreover, the teacher can change this level depending on the skills of the students who are working with the application. Consequently, the number of messages that the teacher receives as a result of occurring events is limited. the difficulty level for the next execution of the application. In a similar way to the previous point, each application can be executed with a different level of difficulty according to the knowledge level of the students in that particular subject. We can better understand this concept if we consider a specific application. For example, in an application to learn maths, level one consists of solving operations of addition; level two combines operations of subtraction and addition; and, finally, level three includes addition, subtraction and simple mathematical problems.<br />
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These configurations are stored in an XML file for use in the future, eliminating the need for the teacher to re-introduce all this information every time that he/she wishes to use the same parameters. To save the settings, each application is associated with a configuration file in which all configurable aspects are detailed. In order to integrate an application into our system, it is essential that the following information is included: • <br />
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Difficulty level: information about features of each difficulty level must be specified in this tag. By using the parameter, the teacher can set the characteristics of each didactical application according to the<br />
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learning level of students. For example, within an application to learn addition, level one comprises single-digit addition problems of two numbers whose results do not exceed 9; level two consists of doubledigit addition problems where each digit of the result does not exceed 9; level three is the same as level two using three or more digits; the following three levels are the same as the first three but without the limitation that the result must not exceed 9. Only one difficulty level can be set for the application. Events to be alerted: a didactical application can generate several events while it is running. Therefore, the teacher can choose for which of these events he/she wishes to receive information. To specify that an event must be notified, the teacher must set the ‘selected’ attribute to TRUE. For example, the teacher can indicate that the event “incorrect result in the addition problem” is monitored. Number of times to produce an alert: this information refers to events that the teacher has set as ‘selected=TRUE’. For each of these events the teacher can indicate the number of repetitions that will generate an alert. That is to say, if the teacher sets a value of 3 for “number of times” for the attribute “incorrect result in the addition problem”, an alert is sent to the mobile device when a student commits an error three times. Each event can be set to a different value according to the learning objectives. If an event has been set to FALSE, information about this attribute is ignored.<br />
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The second element in the Distributed Control Module is the System Information Management Submodule. This is responsible for storing information about students and their performance, classrooms and their configuration, and the applications available to students. The information<br />
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is stored in a MySQL database which has the following tables defined: • <br />
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Students: this table contains personal information about each student, such as name, surname, date of birth, parents’ names, telephone numbers, etc. A screenshot of this application is in Figure 3.<br />
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Evaluations: every row of this table contains the results obtained by a student for each application for a particular date. The results are stored for each parameter independently of alerts chosen by the teacher as they may be used in the future for statistical analyses. The result of every parameter<br />
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is stored in a given field of the row, and is limited by the maximum number of parameters that we have specified in the system installation. Classrooms: this table stores information about the name of the classroom, number of desks, and number of places to which a laptop can be allocated. The system administrator defines where the desks are placed in the classroom and how many places are available at every desk. Places: in this table, information about each laptop is collected. For each laptop we store the IP address, identification of the desk at which it is placed, its physical coordinates within the classroom, and the student who occupies this place. We as-<br />
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Figure 2. Screenshot of students’ information management application<br />
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Figure 3. Example of statistics of the evolution of the student “María Jiménez Sancho” for an application called “Formas”<br />
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sume that every student will be seated in the same position throughout the course. Applications: name, description, and path to the XML configuration.<br />
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The last sub-module in the Distributed Control Module is the Teacher Decision Support Sub-module. This sub-module is responsible for collecting information from both the teacher’s application and students’ applications and processes it to act according to its content. The module receives information from the students’ applications about the event history of the execution of students’ applications. All this information is stored in the database to be used in future statistical analysis, while part of the information is sent to the teacher’s application based on the configuration. The module also sends commands via the teacher’s application that will be executed in students’ applications or laptops. To illustrate further with an example, the teacher can open or close an application remotely in the students’ laptop or open a window in his/ her own PDA to monitor the work of a student in that particular moment. The teacher decision support sub-module is composed of several components, each of them<br />
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performing a particular function in the submodule: • <br />
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Event dispatcher: Once an event is recognized, this component is responsible for identifying the type of event that has occurred, process it if needed, and decide which of the other components is responsible for its execution by using the XML configuration files. Problem detector: This component stores any event received from the event dispatcher and stores it according to student and relevant application. This is followed by a checking process, which uses information in the XML file to detect if any kind of event has exceeded the limits defined in the configuration file. In this case, a notification is sent to the alerts generator. Alerts generator: This component is only activated when a notification from the problem detector is received. It then composes a message containing all the information about the alert (student identification, alert description, priority, and timestamp), which will be sent to the teacher’s application.<br />
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Acting module: The function of this component is to execute the commands sent by the teacher through his/her PDA to act remotely on students’ applications or students’ laptops. The component is responsible for executing orders from the teacher, such as opening or closing an application in the students’ laptops, or activating the remote view of a particular student’s desktop in the teacher’s device. Statistics Analyser: As statistics are generated from permanent data, this component stores all the information received about an event in the database. Presentation of Statistics: By means of this component a teacher, or any other person interested in a student’s evolution, can view the data as a graphical representation. Several kinds of statistics can be presented in order to highlight the evolution of each student, their positions compared to other students, a particular event in an application, etc. The system also offers different types of graphics, including bars charts, pie charts, etc. An example is presented in Figure 3.<br />
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Mobile Device Using the mobile device, the teacher can move around the whole classroom checking the progress of students while at the same time receiving information about other students who are not currently receiving his/her attention. In the system proposed, the mobile device is a PDA in which an application to control the learning process has been installed. This application is called MAESTRO and provides the teacher with two types of functionality: • <br />
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see the graphic distribution of the students in the classroom, ii. modify this distribution according to changes that have taken place in the classroom (see Figure 3).<br />
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The system provides functions intended to evaluate the learning process. It offers the teacher the options of: i. monitoring the state of each student by means of a colour code (see Table 1): 1) if one laptop appears marked with a red cross, it means that the laptop is disconnected; 2) if the screen of the laptop is filled in green, this means that this laptop is connected and there are no alerts related to the student; 3) if, in addition to number 2, the background is red, the laptop is connected but some additional information needs to be checked, for example an alert; 4) if the background is red but the screen is blue, this means that an application is running but some problems have<br />
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Figure 4. A particular distribution of places in the classroom<br />
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The system provides functions related to the spatial distribution of places in the classroom. The teacher can:<br />
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Table 1. Description, states and actions of the graphical representation of students’ laptops €€€€€Description €€€€€Red Cross<br />
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€€€€€No-connected<br />
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Green Screen<br />
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Connected with no problems<br />
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Start an application Show student information<br />
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Green Screen and Red Background<br />
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Connected with problems<br />
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Start an application Show student information Show alerts<br />
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Blue Screen and Red Background<br />
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Connected with problems and executing an application<br />
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Show student information Show alerts Show the application state Finish the application<br />
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Blue Screen<br />
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Connected with no problems and executing an application<br />
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Show student information Show the application state Finish the application<br />
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arisen (see the example in Figure 5); and finally, 5) when the screen is blue and the background is white, an application is running without any problem. ii. opening and closing a particular application by clicking on the desired laptop and choosing between a set of available applications. This option can be selected for only one student, for a<br />
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Figure 5. Example of detected alert and associated details<br />
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set of students or for all students in the classroom. iii. accessing the statistics application. This application offers the same options as the desktop application but is adapted to the size of the mobile device screen. iv. deleting alerts when they have been attended to. Subsequently, the laptop returns to state 2 or 5 depending<br />
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on whether an application is running or not.<br />
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Children’s Laptops In 2009, the Spanish Government approved a law to provide all students in primary education with laptops. This initiative is called Escuela 2.0 (School 2.0) and its implementation has begun this academic year. In the first phase 392.000 students and 20.000 teachers will be provided with laptops for use in the classroom. This phase will end in April 2010. To improve the learning experience in schools, companies publishing Spanish textbooks are starting to offer digital resources in addition to the classic formats. As a consequence, we hope to use this opportunity to facilitate the transition for both teachers and students. In order to send alerts and summaries of student activity to the graphical map, it is necessary to identify the student before he/she begins to work with the applications. To do this, a small application responsible for sending login information, such as student identification and laptop name, must be installed in each of the laptops. The application has two main components: The first sends logs that have been generated by the educational application to the event dispatcher; the second sends the identification information to the distributed control module.<br />
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Learning Applications Learning applications are educational modules developed according to the curriculum specified for each course. As previously mentioned, the only restriction for integrating an application in our framework is that it must fulfil the XML file structure in order for the system to obtain the information presented to the teacher. Application developers must not forget to include information in the XML file about two very important issues: 1) levels for alerts configuration and 2) different difficulty levels that allow the teacher to adapt<br />
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the application to the students’ skills. In addition, information on students’ activity logs must have the same format as that which has been previously defined because the Distributed Control Module must analyse the log in order to generate the correct events.<br />
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Technologies It is relevant at this point to explain in more detail the different technologies that have been used to develop our system: • <br />
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In the mobile device an application for the teacher has been designed using the .Net framework, due to the fact that the vast majority of mobile devices use the Windows Mobile Operating System. However, it would be just as simple to use another technology, such as Java, to develop the application, as many devices include a Java Virtual Machine. Moreover, we have designed a clear interface between the teacher’s application and the rest of the system through Web Services, a technology that can be used in .NET and Java applications, thus allowing our application to be ported to Java powered devices in the future. The remaining applications in our system have been developed using Java technologies, as the majority of operating systems utilise a Java Virtual Machine. One of the most important features of our system is its distributed nature. The teacher sends command to the students through the PDA and the server manages these commands and sends them to the students’ laptops. The learning applications also send messages to the server containing the results of the exercises or alerts, and the server stores the information in the database and sends it to the teacher if needed. There is therefore a lot of information being sent between heterogeneous and distributed el-<br />
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ements and for this reason powerful communication technology is required. We chose Java Message Service for communications due to the fact that it uses a queue located in a server from which remote computers can retrieve messages. For this reason it adapts perfectly to our system. The system manages a lot of information about students, classrooms, applications, student’s results, etc. and the database is therefore essential in order to store all these data. We have elected MySql as it is a powerful and open source software alternative. Finally we would like to remark that we have used XML files by virtue of the fact that there are many different applications that need to exchange data and configuration files during their execution. Nowadays XML format files have become the most popular format for configuration files, due to the ease with which they can be processed by computers and their user-friendliness. We have therefore chosen this format to store metadata and log files.<br />
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FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS We are currently in contact with several experts to perform a case study using the developed architecture. While several tests have been carried out, more formal results are needed in order to identify weaknesses and areas for improvement when being used in real-life situations. We have also identified several new modules that have the ability to enhance the functionality of our system. We consider, for example, that advantage could be taken of incorporated webcams in laptops to process images and provide additional feedback from facial expressions. Teachers may also benefit from a personal diary to take notes on students, such as when an exercise must be repeated or a game checked.<br />
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Although our system provides useful alerts for teacher, older students can be helped by the system more directly. To this end, we are designing a “Learner helper system”, which appears when a student encounters difficulty with an exercise. The helper may provide a clue about how to solve a problem. If the student continues to experience difficulties, a new alert is sent to the teacher. Finally, the idea behind the system is that it be as user-friendly as possible. One way to achieve this is through the automatic installation of modules in student laptops. This would require the manual installation of the identification application, but once accomplished the system could automatically check if new modules need to be installed, or if the entire system needs to be installed for a new student.<br />
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CONCLUSION Computers have become an essential part of our daily lives. We use them to search for information on the Internet, send emails, make purchases online, etc. For this reason it is important that children become familiar with computer technology as soon as possible. We believe that to achieve this goal, now is the moment to introduce different types of information technology, such as computers and virtual whiteboards, into schools. We also consider that the use of information technologies in schools is an effective way to improve the student learning process. The Spanish Government has begun an initiative to provide a laptop for every student in schools, and publishing companies are taking advantage of this to develop digital educational materials in addition to the classic, printed textbooks. In this context, the use of the system proposed here is particularly relevant. The fundamental idea behind this work is to allow the teacher to optimize their time in order to pay more attention to the students that need it.<br />
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To achieve this, the teacher monitors student results in real-time through the use of a mobile device. This reduces the time usually required to attend to student problems, as compared to the traditional approach of waiting for exercises to be completed and received before they can be corrected. Our system is clearly a tool designed to enhance the learning process of students. We would also like to refer to the technological aspects of our work. Our system is designed to be both flexible and powerful. To accomplish this we have designed a modular system, distributed along different devices, a teacher’s PDA, student laptop and a main component responsible for synchronising the whole system. Technologies like Java and .NET allow our system to be installed in different operating systems, such as Windows, Linux or Mac. Similarly, the mobile device can function with a Windows Mobile operating system or simply with any other that supports a Java Virtual Machine.<br />
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McFarlane, A., Sparrowhawk, A., & Heald, Y. (2002). Report on the educational use of games: An exploration by TEEM of the contribution which games can make to the education process, Retrieved October 19, 2009, from http://www.teem. org.uk/publications/teem_gamesined_full.pdf<br />
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT<br />
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Xclass (n.d.). Sun Tech. Retrieved from http:// www.suntechgroup.com/sunindex/xclass/index. html<br />
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This study and work is financed by the Ministry of Education and Science, Spain, as part of DESACO Project (TIN2008-06596-C02-2) and the F.P.U Programme.<br />
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REFERENCES BOE. (Boletín Oficial del Estado (n.d.). Oficial Notices from the Spanich Goverment) of August292009. Retrieved October, 19, 2009, from: http://www.boe.es/boe/dias/2009/08/05/pdfs/ BOE-A-2009-13026.pdf JOIN Project. (n.d.). JOIN Project. Retrieved October, 19, 2009, from: http://www.guidanceresearch.org/sigossee/join/<br />
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NetSupport School. (n.d.). NetSupport School. Retrieved October, 19, 2009, from: http://www. netsupportschool.com/index.asp Nussbaum, M., Rosas, R., Rodríguez, P., Sun, Y., & Valdivia, V. (1999). Diseño, desarrollo y evaluación de video juegos portátiles educativos y autorregulados. Ciencia al Día., 3(2), 1–20. SMART. (n.d.). SMART Sync Classroom Management Software. Retrieved October, 19, 2009, from: http://www2.smarttech.com/st/en-us/products/ synchroneyes+classroom+management+softwa re/default.htm WebCT. (n.d.). BlackBoard. Retrieved from http:// www.blackboard.com/<br />
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Metadata: A common way to define this concept is “data about data”. In our system, metadata are data about the configuration of several modules. For example, by using metadata we define the value of parameters to send alerts, how many times a child must fail in order for an alert to be sent. Alert: In our system, an alert is a message that is sent to the teacher’s mobile device, providing a warning about a child who needs attention. The message is displayed with a colour until it is acknowledged by the teacher. Distributed Control System (DCS): A DCS is a system that has different interconnected and<br />
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interrelated components in different devices. Our system encompasses three main locations: the mobile device managed by the teacher, a server that manages communications and calculations, and students applications in their laptops. System: A system is a set of modules that work towards a common goal. These modules are interrelated and interconnected and exchange information in order to obtain combined results. New Technologies in Education: This term encompasses all the computers, electronic devices, software systems and digital resources that are available for use to improve educational systems. The use of laptop and desktop computers in classrooms is becoming increasingly common, and traditional boards are being replaced or complemented with projectors and virtual whiteboards, etc. Mobile Devices: A mobile device is a pocketsized computing device with a display screen that<br />
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functions by touch input or a miniature keyboard. Smartphones and PDAs are the most popular choices in situations where a computer is required, but cannot be used due to the inconvenience of size and its lack of portability. One device that has become very popular recently is the Netbook, which can be classified between a mobile device and a laptop, and has been chosen by the Spanish Government to be used by students in schools. Module: In the context of our system, a module is a part that fulfils a particular purpose within the whole system. It is relatively independent and incorporates a defined interface to communicate with the rest of the modules. Classroom: This is the place where teaching takes place. In our system it is possible to define its structure, defining the sites where desks are placed, the number of positions available at each desk and the student who is seated in this position throughout the course.<br />
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Chapter 25<br />
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The Making of Nomadic Work: Understanding the Mediational Role of ICTs Aparecido Fabiano Pinatti de Carvalho University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland Luigina Ciolfi University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland Breda Gray University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland<br />
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ABSTRACT Computer technologies, especially ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies), have become ubiquitous in people’s lives. Nowadays, mobile phones, PDAs, laptops and a constellation of software applications are more and more used for a variety of activities carried out in both personal and professional lives. Given the features that these technologies provide and are provided with, for example, connectivity and portability, it can be said that ICTs have the potential to support nomadic work practices which are seen as increasingly characteristic of the knowledge economy. This chapter presents a review of the concept of nomadic work and, based on a broad literature analysis, discusses the ways in which ICTs may empower people who are involved with nomadic work practices. It aims to give a starting point for those who intend to develop further research on technologically-mediated nomadic work practices in the knowledge economy.<br />
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KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY AND NOMADIC WORK Workers in the knowledge economy who are physically mobile may have to develop their productive activities across several places (Lilischkis, 2003; Rossitto & Eklundh, 2007; Su & Mark, 2008).<br />
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They generate economic benefits by working on knowledge production and dissemination or using knowledge and knowledge-based tools to accomplish their work tasks (Kim & Mauborgne, 1999). Examples of knowledge economy workers would be mathematicians, psychologists, computer scientists, software engineers, economists and so forth. It is important to note that to be a<br />
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DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch025 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.<br />
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knowledge economy worker does not necessarily mean being a nomadic worker and vice versa. The nomadic aspect of the work undertaken by so-called nomadic workers is described in a variety of ways in the literature. For instance, Su and Mark (2008) argue that nomadic workers are people who are constantly on the move, usually travelling long distances, working wherever they happen to be and carrying their resources with them to set up workplaces on the move. Rossitto and Eklundh (2007) characterize these workers as people who lack a stable workplace where their work activities can be conducted. Lilischkis (2003) defines them as types of mobile workers who develop their work activities in more than two fixed locations, moving from one work location to another from time to time; work may be carried out in specific locations recurrently or not and the time period spent in each location may vary widely. In this chapter, nomadic workers are defined as different kinds of people who use the strategy of moving their workplace to perform their productive activities across different locations (de Carvalho, 2009). The latter definition is based on the common assumption presented in the three former ones, i.e. that in order to be considered as a nomadic worker one must work in different locations. It differs from the other three in the sense that it makes explicit that the mobility of the workplace is a constitutive criterion that differentiates nomadic workers from other kinds of mobile workers (see Lilischkis (2003) for details about the several types of mobile workers). Here mobility of workplace means bringing along all those resources that allow one to transform a generic space, i.e. a physical structure, into a lived and experienced place, i.e. a space invested with human experience, values and meaning where work activities can be carried out (Ciolfi et al., 2005; Rossitto, 2008). Adopting the actor-network approach, Su and Mark (2008) refer to these mobile assets as actants. Some examples of nomadic workers might be IT executives, academics, sales<br />
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representatives or diplomats (Lilischkis, 2003; Su & Mark, 2008). In order to carry out their activities, these workers move their workplace with them to where they can find specific resources they need to perform their work. Like pastoral nomads move their households to places where they can find green pasture for their herd or water for their crops, knowledge economy nomadic workers move their workplace to locations where resources like time, space, privacy, silence or other people are available. This location may also be a transit space such as a train station or an airport through which they move to attend international meetings, conferences, the company head office or a subsidiary office. The mobility of workplace is dictated by the availability of resources and by specific work constraints. For instance, a looming deadline might push such workers to move their workplace to a train or to their home when and where time and space are suitably available. The meanings which nomadic workers invest a space with, such as e.g. privacy, quietness, expediency, etc. are relevant aspects of the relationship between activities and the locations where they are carried out (Rossitto, 2008). When it comes to the mobile aspect of nomadicity, careful attention should be paid to what it means. That is because the concept of mobility itself is complex and can be used in different and conflicting manners (Andriessen & Vartiainen, 2006; Kristoffersen & Lujungberg, 1999; Perry & Brodie, 2006). Mobility as a concept can be considered a multi-layered notion comprised of different dimensions, such as spatial, temporal and contextual (Kakihara & Sørensen, 2001). Since nomadicity is based on the concept of mobility of the workplace, it can be argued that all three dimensions are embedded in it as well (Cousins & Robey, 2005). However, although in the literature on mobile and nomadic work special attention is paid to the spatial dimension of mobility, the temporal and contextual dimensions seem to be neglected. The possibility of being temporally<br />
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and contextually mobile in ways that do not involve physical movement should also be taken into account, especially when considering work conducted by knowledge economy workers who are not necessarily bounded to a physical space (Cousins & Robey, 2005; 2009; Rossitto, 2008; Vartiainen, 2006). This will be further discussed in the following sections of this chapter. Taking into account that knowledge economy workers deal with the production or use of knowledge, which is something abstract and not constrained to a location, and that a large technological apparatus is available for dealing with the mobility of the workplace (Davis, 2002), nomadic work practices in the knowledge economy are expected to become more and more common (Su & Mark, 2008). This chapter explores the mediational role that technology may play in nomadic work practices. It is organized into the following four sections: the first section approaches issues concerning nomadic work practices in the knowledge economy; in the second section items of the technological apparatus available for nomadic workers are presented and discussed in relation to how they can help these workers to cope with the issues presented in the previous section; the third section considers the problems that may emerge when using several items from the available apparatus; and the fourth section points to possible directions for future research in this area.<br />
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ISSUES RELATED TO KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY NOMADIC WORK As previously discussed, nomadic work practices demand that workers move their workplace to the location where they are so that work activities can be performed. Such mobility requires some sort of work which Perry and Brodie (2006) refer to as mobilization work. According to Perry’s and Brodie’s (2006) findings, there are several activities that precede and follow a work session in a different location that are necessary to get started<br />
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and finished with the work task. Rossitto (2008) calls attention to the same issue in her work, illustrating different moments in nomadic work activities. Such activities are basically related to: 1. getting prepared to work in a different place and to deal with unpredictability, 2. setting up the workplace and 3. disassembling it after the work session (Perry & Brodie, 2006; Perry et al., 2001). In fact those activities are directly related to what Su and Mark (2008) call nomadic work strategy. The authors suggest that nomadic workers approach the mobility of workplace through a three-focus strategy that spans the mobilization work activities mentioned by Perry and Brodie (2006). In studying the strategy used by pastoral nomads and the way that “modern” nomadic workers move about, Su and Mark (2008) suggest that the nomadic workers’ strategy can be summarized in three practices: assemblage of actants, i.e. packing everything needed for working; seeking resources, i.e. looking for infrastructure where the workplace can be set and accessing the information necessary for the work; and integrating with others, which means staying in contact with remote colleagues involved with the work and following the progress of work activities being conducted in different places. Similar studies by Bartolucci (2007), Oulasvirta and Sumari (2007) and Rossitto (2008) support Su and Mark’s findings. Thus knowledge economy nomadic work practices point to numerous issues concerning nomadic work achievement. This section addresses some of them.<br />
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Place-Making A central question related to the making of nomadic work concerns how place is made and re-made in the process of changing spaces into specific kinds of temporary workplaces (Ciolfi et al., 2005; Rossitto & Eklundh, 2007). Indeed, place has been considered a practical concern for mobile<br />
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workers for a long time (Brown & O’Hara, 2003). Such high importance is attributed to place, that Rossitto (2008) claims that place can be used as a framework to investigate and understand nomadic work practices and goes on to show how this could be practically done adopting place as her framework to analyze nomadic practices undertaken by groups of students in the studies she conducted. Vartiainen (2006) notes that every work activity “happens somewhere, either physical or virtual or mental space” (pp.31). Although Vartiainen says space, here it is argued that work happens either in physical, virtual or mental places because, beyond the space where activities happen, there are all the meanings and values that the worker invests in particular spaces, the social relations that those spaces allow for and the practical activities that can be performed as specific spaces are made into workplaces. Taking everything into account, place can be seen to play a central role in enabling nomadic work practices in a relationship where not only work can change place but also place can change work (Brown & O’Hara, 2003; Ciolfi et al., 2005; Rossitto, 2008). In the context of nomadic work practices, place is fluid, which means that it is not achieved once for all, but it is constantly built and rebuilt out of available spaces (Rossitto, 2008). Regarding the use of computer technologies for place-making activities, it can be said that, through their use, a generic space can be appropriated and experienced in a way that it becomes a place. For instance, carrying resources or accessing services so that a space can become lived and experienced, i.e. turned into a place, can be easily done by using this kind of technologies (Brown & O’Hara, 2003). According to Lilischkis (2003), the more often workplace moves, the more useful mobile technologies may be. Here mobile technologies are considered both portable technologies that can be worn or carried and fixed technologies that allow for access of virtual mobile resources, such as e-mails and web applications, in accordance with Andriessen’s and Vartiainen’s (2006) defini-<br />
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tion. It is worth mentioning that these supports in place-making activities are only one of the ways which ICTs may empower nomadic workers, giving them the tools that they need to deal with the discontinuities of time and space that they experience.<br />
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Access to Informational and Technological Resources Access to information is another critical issue for knowledge economy nomadic work (Perry et al., 2001; Su & Mark, 2008). E-mails, text and video documents, pictures, spreadsheets, databases, maps and calendars are some of the tools and artifacts that can hold relevant information that may be necessary for nomadic workers to work on their assignments. This might be information about the stock of a company, a report on a specific research topic, statistical analyses about sales, the list of appointments for the following days and so forth. Having access to such information allows for organizing work and keeping it going. As important as the access to information, is the access to technological resources (Perry et al., 2001). For instance, one may need to have access to a specific piece of software, to a storage server, to a collaborative tool, etc. Not having such access may impede the work to be accomplished. Perry et al. (2001), for instance, found in the results of their study that urgency or priority were not criteria for deciding which activity should be performed first. Instead, context and availability of technological resources dictated when the work should be approached. This raises questions about how work priorities are set and whether these are goal oriented or technologically determined. In the context of accessing informational and technological resources, computer technologies can facilitate access to actants anytime they are needed. In the following section of this chapter, Technological Apparatus, some of the ICTs that allow for access to information and communication resources will be discussed. For now, it is worth<br />
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mentioning that such technologies have already allowed for weight reduction, so as Vartiainen (2006) points out, making possible the carriage of larger amounts of informational and technological resources. Nowadays, nomadic workers can plan the mobility of their workplace beforehand and have with them most of the informational and technological resources they need to perform their work activities. Carrying with them the resources they need is a way to guarantee access to them. A key advantage of this is the creation of the opportunity to make use of dead-time for work activities (Perry et al., 2001), i.e. to use the time that would be lost between two working sessions while moving from a location to another, as many work contexts may now require of workers.<br />
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Access to Human Resources Human resources are another kind of actants to which nomadic workers need access. As a matter of fact, nomadic workers themselves are human resources that should be accessible at some point, especially in collaborative work settings. As Rossitto (2008) puts it, the adjective nomadic may refer to “a situation characterized by collaboration between individuals, by work occurring at a variety of places (traditional offices, home, etc) and by a range of technological support” (pp.42). Elaborating on the collaborative aspect, nomadic workers may need to be in contact with other nomadic or non-nomadic co-workers to keep up-to-date with work activities being performed in other locations (Su & Mark, 2008). The potential use of ICTs for coping with the collaboration in work has been explored for a long time in a well established computer science research area called CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) (Perry & Brodie, 2006; Rossitto & Eklundh, 2007). CSCW is a research field that investigates the meditational role that technologies have in cooperative human activities such as collaboration, coordination, awareness mechanisms and information sharing (Bannon & Schmidt, 1991).<br />
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Besides its collaborative aspect, access to human resources can be used for maintaining a social relationship with other co-workers. Perry et al. (2001) point to the importance of keeping informal awareness in the office when working away for some time. According to the authors, such interaction is important to build a sense of community. In this sense, several ICTs such as mobile phones, instant messengers, e-mail, and so forth, can be used for keeping such contact. However, the issue of accessing people and being accessible must be approached carefully. For instance, Perry’s and Brodie’s (2006) work on understanding how technology supports mobilization work showed that access to human resources is a delicate matter and that the design of tools for that purpose should be carefully thought-out. One of the parts of their study involved technological probes where users were presented with prototypes of some mobile applications that could improve personal awareness of co-workers and support communication between members of a work community. Not surprisingly, such technological resources were considered a double-edged sword, because at the same time as one could see the whereabouts of their colleagues, their colleagues could also see their whereabouts. According to the users, this enhanced awareness could indeed support communication among co-workers, but could also change work relations, raising privacy, surveillance and user control issues among others.<br />
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TECHNOLOGICAL APPARATUS Having discussed relevant issues of nomadic work practices in the knowledge economy, this section approaches some of the current computer technologies available on the market which nomadic workers may use to cope with them. Since the 1990s, the potential use of computer technology to support nomadic work activities has been perceived and discussed. For instance, Kleinrock (1996) in his seminal paper “Nomadic-<br />
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ity: Anytime, Anywhere in a Disconnected World” foresaw the development of a wide range of ICTs that would allow for anytime, anywhere access to informational and technological resources, coining the term nomadic computing alluding to all technologies which would enable people’s and digital artifacts’ mobility. In fact, ICTs became pervasive in people’s life and computer processing capacity started being embedded in everyday life objects bringing ubiquitous computing to reality and supporting people with different personal and professional activities (Gorlenko & Merrick, 2003; Lyytinen & Yoo, 2002a). In so doing, ICTs appear to have been empowering nomadic work practices in the sense that they give nomadic workers more control over the mobility of their workplace, making such mobility easier. There seems to be a consensus in the literature that ICTs provide workers with the possibility of easily developing their activities across different locations and in flexible manners by offering them access to the necessary resources for performing their work tasks (Andriessen & Vartiainen, 2006; Bogdan et al., 2006; Chen & Nath, 2005; Kleinrock, 1996; Kristensen, 2002; Kristoffersen & Lujungberg, 1999; Lilischkis, 2003; Lyytinen & Yoo, 2002b; Perry & Brodie, 2006; Perry et al., 2001; Su & Mark, 2008; Vartiainen, 2006). Especially for knowledge economy workers, anytime/anywhere computing enables work to be detached from employment location and times; as their work resources are primarily conceptual, they can be easily represented digitally (Davis, 2002). It is important to notice that ‘to make’ possible is different from ‘making it happen’. As Chen and Nath (2005) observe, nomadic work practices depends on the context, the type of work and especially on the interests of employers and employees. Through his studies, Lilischkis (2003) concludes that ICTs can support mobile work practices and, consequently, nomadic work practices by allowing for location independence, weight reduction, instant information retrieval, swifter<br />
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data processing and cost reduction. On the other hand, according to the author, not using ICTs may cause problems such as non-accessibility, unknown location, limited ability to carry resources, limited resource access and media breaks. In the following, some components of the technological apparatus that may be used for coping with the development of work activities across several locations are presented. These are only a few examples of the technologies available for this, but they illustrate how the issues discussed in the first section can be supported. The technological apparatus presented is composed of either hardware, such as laptops, palmtops and handhelds, software, such as digital agenda and video conference tools and miscellaneous technologies, such as e-mail and Voice over IP (VoIP). It is worth mentioning that totally relying on technology can cause disruptions and frustration during the work (Cousins & Robey, 2005; Olson & Olson, 2000), an issue that will be approached in following sections of this chapter.<br />
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Laptops Laptop computers are portable devices that can be easily carried and that can be operated while lying on the users’ lap. Besides portability, which is directly related to its size and weight reduction, these devices may offer users features such as immediacy, connectivity, all-in-one device, easy access to ports and up-to-date information (DeFeo & Cheng, 2005). Such features can potentially support in dealing with the issues previously discussed in section 2, as it is discussed in the following. To begin with, immediacy allows nomadic workers to have at hand informational and technological resources that they may need to perform their activities. Work files and personal files can be easily accessed independent of a network connection and face-to-face collaborative activities can be supported by using the laptop to demonstrate concepts and ideas to co-workers, as<br />
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Rossitto (2008) illustrates in one of the vignettes she presents (pp.136-138). Immediacy is directly related to the all-in-one feature, which means the aggregation of several devices into a single one. Some of the devices regularly integrated in a laptop are keyboard, mouse, screen, speaker, webcam, card readers, CD/DVD reader/writer, USB ports, Modem and Ethernet ports and wireless access data card. All those resources may help with the issue of making place, allowing nomadic workers to set up the workplace and experience an available space in a way that work activities can be carried out. Moreover, the possibility of getting connected to the Internet and using ICTs can support the access to the technological, informational and human resources, which may be valuable to the accomplishment of the work task. In addition to that, the easy access to ports is a valuable feature when it comes to the connection of external resources such as monitors, data projectors, USB keys, printers and so forth, which may be required for a specific task. It is true that there are some problems concerning the use and maintenance of such devices, such as performance, power longevity, upgradability, durability and security (Lawence & Er, 2007; Lilischkis, 2003; Su & Mark, 2008), but, notwithstanding the problems, laptops can undoubtedly support work across different locations by easily and efficiently allowing the packing of a number of relevant actants so that workers can move their workplace to a new location, get access to necessary technological, information and human resources and, finally, start developing their activities.<br />
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Palmtops and Handhelds Like laptops, palmtops and handhelds are portable devices. Their differences in comparison to laptops rely on their size, especially when it comes to the size of the display, weight and storage and processing capacity (Gorlenko & Merrick, 2003).<br />
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Though palmtop and handheld are often used interchangeably (Kristoffersen & Lujungberg, 1999; Lilischkis, 2003), Gorlenko and Merrick (2003) draw the line at the kind of interaction that they allow for. The authors mention that even though palmtops can be easily held in the user’s hand, they require to be put on a flat surface in order to allow efficient and prolonged use. Handhelds, on the other hand, are fully mobile devices, i.e. transportable devices that do not require to be positioned in a fixed surface to be operated – the user may operate it while on the move – that fit the users’ hand perfectly (Gorlenko & Merrick, 2003). Examples of handheld devices are mobile phones, smart phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). A characteristic feature of handheld devices is ultra small keyboard that many times is replaced by a touch screen that can offer a virtual keyboard or recognize hand writing. Modern handheld computers may also accept voice input and integrate a digital camera. These devices are provided with certain storage, computing and connectivity capacity allowing some specific activities to be carried out. Due to small size of the display and, when it is present, the keyboard, activities such as long text edition are not suitable. However, when it comes to activities such as taking short notes or voice memos, selecting items from a list, showing small pieces of information and marking appointments these devices can be very useful. For nomadic workers, palmtop and handheld features may be helpful. Depending on the kind of activities they plan to perform in the different locations where they intend to work, taking one of these devices may be enough. Moreover, their size and weight allow users to easily take it from its carriage pocket and operate it, indeed, more easily than dealing with a laptop. Oulasvirta and Sumari (2007) show how handheld devices play an important role in mobile information work, illustrating situations where a palmtop or handheld would be preferable against a laptop.<br />
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In talking about popularity, according Lilischkis (2003), mobile phones are the most common device among mobile workers. Since such devices put together portability and communication capacity, it is somehow expected that they be among the most popular devices. As de Vries (2005) puts it, communication is a very basic human need and, in addition to that, it is directly related to collaboration in work (Perry & Brodie, 2006; Rossitto, 2008; Su & Mark, 2008). Another emerging kind of handheld devices is smart phones. They assemble together both the capabilities of a mobile phone and “PC-like” functionalities (Oulasvirta & Sumari, 2007). In doing so, they can be used as both a PDA and a communication tool. Overall, the features offered by these devices may support the development of work activities across different locations by giving workers resources for making place on the move and accessing technological and informational resources that may be necessary for the development of their work tasks (Lilischkis, 2003).<br />
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Digital Media Storage Devices Digital media storage devices are another kind of technology that allows digital resources to be easily assembled and taken to wherever the worker needs or wants to go. Long text documents, books, scientific articles, spreadsheets, slide sets and picture, video or audio libraries can be easily packaged together in a small USB key. Digitally representing information resources allows for weight reduction (Vartiainen, 2006) and, therefore, a larger quantity of resources can be brought along when moving to a new location. It would be impossible to carry the same amount of printed books, papers, pictures and so forth as their digital versions allow for. Carrying resources means to have immediate access to them, as far as the necessary device for bridging the access is available. This is a constraint of some digital storage media device: they require<br />
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other devices to give access to and to visualize the stored resources. However, this is something that is progressively changing. Nowadays devices such as MP4 allow for both storage and visualization of some types of resources. The main point here is that digital storage media devices allow for efficient assemblage of actants and, consequently, it supports the access to informational and technological resources when mobility of the workplace happens.<br />
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Digital Calendars Digital calendars are also an information technology that may help people who work across different locations to have more control over their activities. Different from the three former technologies just presented, this is a software technology that offers functionalities such as checking time availability, scheduling appointments, organizing meetings and making calendars public, or at least part of them. Moreover, digital calendar applications may offer synchronization features so that different calendar applications installed in different devices may stay consistent (Oulasvirta & Sumari, 2007). Digital calendars are commonly part of the applications available on PDAs and smart phones. Keeping digital calendars may have several advantages over paper-based calendars, especially taking into account a collaborative setting. To begin with, the functionality for sharing schedules may help with meeting organizations. For instance, when someone is going to organize a meeting, s/he may check their co-workers availability without having to call or visit each person that should take part of the meeting and then propose a time that suits everybody. When the participants do not use the sharing functionality, the organizing meeting feature may offer the possibility of conducting a poll in which participants can state the times they would be available. Still regarding the meeting organization feature, with a few clicks the meeting organizer can send out the meeting agenda or a reminder<br />
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message to the participants. Such features may be very useful in a collaborative setting involving nomadic workers in different sites. Another advantage could be the possibility of adding details about a specific meeting or register parallel appointments. With paper calendars, the available space is usually restricted so that it can be hard to write any detail about the meeting. Regarding parallel appointments, though people usually focus attention in one appointment at a time, they can be aware of other things going on at the same time that they could alternatively attend. To conclude, on-line digital calendars offer anytime/anywhere access independent of carrying a specific device; it is possible to access them through the Internet using any connected device. Despite the advantages, there may be those who would argue that operating a paper-based calendar is easier.<br />
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The Internet and the World Wide Web The Internet is a ubiquitous computer network structure that connects users worldwide providing a vast collection of resources and services over the standard TPC/IP protocol (Kleinrock, 2001). The available resources are mainly composed of hypertext documents and applications, which compose the World Wide Web (WWW), and the infra-structure for e-mail exchange, file transfer and sharing and video and audio publishing and broadcasting. Such infra-structure allows for services such as e-mail, instant messages, on-line chats and video on demand. Kleinrock (2001) claims that the Internet is one of the main tools that allow for nomadic work. In previous work (Kleinrock, 1996), he discusses the concept of nomadicity and the importance of access anytime/anywhere. In fact, Internet can be considered an important enabler of nomadic work practices considering the anytime/anywhere feature (Andriessen & Vartiainen, 2006; Lilischkis, 2003; Perry et al., 2001; Rossitto, 2008; Su & Mark, 2008).<br />
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Regarding knowledge economy activities, allowing for the Web and for services like the aforementioned, the Internet provided a powerful tool for knowledge production and dissemination. Resources from Web 2.0 such as blogs, social networks and so forth, allowed people who were not involved directly with research to start producing and disseminating content that somehow is related to their knowledge about the world (O’Reilly, 2007). In the following, some of the resources available through the Internet are briefly approached and ways how they may support knowledge economy nomadic work practices are presented.<br />
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E-Mail E-mail is an asynchronous method of communication that freed message exchange from physical transportation services and allowed drastic reduction in message delivery time (Lilischkis, 2003). It is one of the most common means of communication used by knowledge economy workers, as it can be verified in the literature. When it comes to communication, it is difficult to find a study which does not mention the use of this service in some way. In talking about nomadic work practices, e-mail asynchronous quality allows for workers’ temporal mobility (Kakihara & Sørensen, 2001). By using e-mail asynchronously, workers can deal with specific message when time is suitably available (Lawence & Er, 2007; Rossitto & Eklundh, 2007) and, in this way, work in different locations and time zones can be articulated (Su & Mark, 2008). Combined with access anytime/anywhere that it allows for, e-mail service can support nomadic workers to get in contact with informational and/ or human resources necessary to perform their work activities. Moreover, platform independence, a quality of many Internet resources, is another quality of e-mail that contributes to successful nomadic work practices in the knowledge economy. E-mail messages can be accessed through a variety<br />
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of devices running different operational systems and software applications. It is worth mentioning that e-mail services may also be used for file transfer. By attaching files, workers are able to send other people or even themselves informational and sometimes technological resources so that they can access it in other locations (Perry et al., 2001; Rossitto, 2008; Su & Mark, 2008). This is another way that e-mail can support nomadic work practices. All these benefits come together with reduced cost. Sending e-mail messages may cost nothing when using some of the free e-mail services on the Internet. As observable in studies such as (Chen & Nath, 2005; Rossitto, 2008; Su & Mark, 2008), cost is one of the concerns of nomadic workers.<br />
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VoIP VoIP is a set of communication technologies that make possible the transmission of voice over the Internet Protocol (IP). It allows for a synchronous method of communication using voice, like the provided by telephone technology, but at a lower cost (Chen & Nath, 2005). In so doing, it gives nomadic workers the option of conducting voice synchronous communication when it is necessary and the interlocutor is available for such an interaction. Like e-mail, it allows access to human resources and can also be used as a proxy to have access to technological resources, as when Perry et al. (2001) describe how mobile phones could be used to get access to fax, printer, etc. VoIP is a useful resource, like any other technology that allows for voice communication, since this kind of communication may be very important in some situations. As Richter at al. (2006) puts it, “giving a colleague a call, rather than writing an angry email is the appropriate way to respond to a setback”. That is because voice intonation tells much about the person’s mood and may give clues about how to approach a situation.<br />
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Video Conference Tools Video conference tools are software applications that allow for synchronous video and audio broadcasting and, optionally, some kind of interaction between participants, e.g. collaboratively editing a virtual whiteboard (Olson & Olson, 2000; Rossitto, 2008). Like VoIP technology, it may support the contact of human resources and the development collaborative activities with co-workers which are in different sites. Such tools give nomadic workers an alternative to travelling long distances in order to meet other people, which can be interesting for companies or for self-employed workers to reduce travelling costs (Lilischkis, 2003). Moreover, it allows participants to see facial expression that together with voice intonation may be useful for avoiding misunderstandings (Richter et al., 2006). In relation to cost, nowadays it is easier to conduct video conferences than it was when this kind of technology first appeared. The first video conference tools where rather expensive and contained several usability problems as Olson and Olson (2000) discuss. However, as time passed by and new technologies were developed or improved, lower cost alternatives were made available, such as the video over IP services that follow the same precepts of VoIP technology. Currently, a laptop with a webcam, broadband connection and the right software may solve the problem. It is worth noticing that, though video conference tools may reduce the need to travel long distances, contemporary video conference technology allows sessions to be conducted wherever the worker is, detaching her/him from a fixed location and enhancing her/his virtual mobility. It may be true that such kind of technology is still unstable and needs improvement (Rossitto, 2008). Moreover, there may still exist situations where face-to-face meeting should be preferable (Olson & Olson, 2000), which leaves open questions about whether technological facilities will overcome such a preference one day. Nonetheless,<br />
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this technology may be useful to cope with some work situations experienced by nomadic workers.<br />
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On-Line Maps and GPS Systems Another on-line tool that may support nomadic workers when moving to a new location is on-line maps and GPS systems. Through these technologies people can get to know the surroundings of the area where they are going to and even to plan routes between locations in such an area. These services can be especially interesting for those who do not know very well the area that they are going to visit (Lawence & Er, 2007) and may support nomadic workers in seeking for resources such as hotels, restaurants, airports, trains and bus station, and so forth so that they can plan a trip beforehand and move around the unknown area.<br />
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On-Line Storage Area On-line storage area is a relatively new service that allows users to store their digital resources on the Web. It is becoming more and more popular with the spread of broadband connection that allows massive amount of data to be quickly uploaded to or downloaded from the Internet (Li, 2009). Such kind of service is usually used for both backup and file sharing purposes. Like digital media storage devices, it allows for weight reduction, giving nomadic workers access to a large variety of actants that they may need to carry out their work activities. In this case, they do not even have to worry about carrying a physical device such as a USB key or an external hard driver. However, they will be dependent on the quality of the network connection to get access to the necessary resources effectively, a problem faced when any Internet resource is used. In addition to that, as Mulligan et al. (2006) mention, there are relevant issues regarding data security and users’ identity when using this kind of service. Notwithstanding the issues, this is another tool that may be used for dealing with work across different sites.<br />
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Public Infrastructure Although knowledge economy nomadic workers deal with knowledge, which is abstract and can be easily represented digitally and carried in or accessed through ICTs, some work activities may require the use of specific resources which may be difficult to carry, such as a data projector, or may require a whole infrastructure to work, such as wireless Internet connection points. In so doing, there are situations that the public infrastructure may dictate the ways in which work activities are approached. Therefore, having a well developed public infrastructure may afford nomadic workers the opportunity to accomplish their work tasks (Brown & O’Hara, 2003; Lilischkis, 2003; Su & Mark, 2008). Lilischkis (2003) points to a relevant development of public infrastructure regarding public Internet access points, both wireless or not. Besides Internet connection, resources such as data projector, projector screen, printers and other kinds of computer technology are becoming more and more common in the so-called nomadic computing environments (Edwards et al., 2001; Kleinrock, 2001; Lyytinen & Yoo, 2002b; Rossitto, 2008). The availability of such resources is certainly an important enabler for nomadic work practices in the knowledge economy.<br />
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LOST IN THE MIDST OF A CONSTELLATION OF ICTs The technologies presented in section two give an idea of the number and the heterogeneity of technological resources that compose the apparatus available for supporting work across several locations. In fact, as some authors put it, there exists a constellation of ICTs available, which can be suitable for different contexts of interaction and different activities (Rossitto & Eklundh, 2007; Vartiainen, 2006). For instance, people may want to use different ICTs for keeping the boundaries<br />
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between personal and professional lives (Cousins & Robey, 2005). Moreover, keeping data scattered across multiple devices may also be a strategy for data security, i.e. for avoiding data to be accessed by unwanted people, or for operational safety, i.e. for being able to continue working in case one device stops working (Oulasvirta & Sumari, 2007). Although a variety of technologies may be helpful, the use of different technologies has some implications. Oulasvirta and Summary (2007), for instance, observed in their results that the management of different devices may be problematic, demanding physical and mental effort with activities that are not the focus of the work. Rossitto (2008) also observes such a problem. In one of the studies she performed, participants got lost in the midst of the constellation of ICTs they were using, losing track of some artifacts they developed during some work sessions. Fortunately, the loss did not have a big impact on the final results of the work. Besides the issue of losing track of artifacts, there is also the issue of keeping consistency among devices and applications so that the accessed information can always be up-to-date. For example, there is no use to have access to a personal calendar in a PDA if it is not consistent with the calendar in the PC, Laptop or on the Internet. This could lead to scheduling a meeting on a time that is already allocated to another activity. In the same way, it is not feasible to work on an old version of a report if the current edition activity is on or dependent on sections that have been already changed. Therefore, consistency between devices arises as an important issue related to keeping multiple devices (Cousins & Robey, 2005; Oulasvirta & Sumari, 2007) and raises questions about its impacts on nomadic work practices and on the design of technologies that may compose a mobile kit and about the strategies nomadic workers develop to cope with it.<br />
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FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS Research on nomadic work practices in the knowledge economy still has a long way to go (Su & Mark, 2008). Although there are many studies approaching the use of technology to cope with spatial mobility and place-making activities (Bartolucci, 2007; Brown & O’Hara, 2003; Ciolfi et al., 2005; Hislop & Axtell, 2009; Luff & Heath, 1998; Rossitto, 2008), the temporal and contextual dimensions of nomadicity still require further attention (Cousins & Robey, 2005; de Carvalho, 2009). In addition to that, there are many other issues regarding technologically-mediated nomadic work practices in the knowledge economy that should be approached closely. To begin with, there is still a need to improve the current methods for studying nomadicity as well as to develop new methods and methodologies to research different aspects of the concept (Cousins & Robey, 2005; Kietzmann, 2008). In line with this, the Nomadic Work/Life in the Knowledge Economy Project1 (Cosmobilities, 2009) sets out to investigate innovative ways to study nomadicity. In addition to that, there are also issues concerning nomadic workers’ mobility patterns. Some research studies claim that physical spatial mobility is something that mobile and, consequently, nomadic workers will always have to deal with especially to conduct face-to-face meetings with work partners (Perry et al., 2001; Su & Mark, 2008). However, Andriessen and Vartiainen (2006) draw attention to a possible new paradigm of mobile work called mobile virtual work. This raises questions about whether physical mobility to attend face-to-face meetings will remain a major need for nomadic work practices or whether it will be totally or partially replaced by the facilities offered by technologies such as the ones presented in section 2. In either case, the reasons behind it and the implications for nomadic work practices in the knowledge economy should also be investigated. Olson and Olson (2000) present<br />
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some predictions about these issues that should be investigated in current times. Moreover, there are also issues about the disruption that current and novel technologies may cause to nomadic workers. Although this chapter discussed how technology may empower nomadic workers, technology may also disrupt and cause problems such as over work, additional work to manage multiple devices, unnecessary and unproductive interruptions, undesirable blurring between work and personal lives and so forth (Cousins & Robey, 2005; Davis, 2002; Oulasvirta & Sumari, 2007; Perry et al., 2001). Furthermore, Kleinrock (2001) lists a series of concerns such as weight, size, battery life, loss, theft and damage of portable devices that may hinder the potential support that technology can offer nomadic workers. Besides, relying on technology may be very disruptive of work when technological breakdown happens, pieces of equipment do not work as expected, or desirable infra-structure is not available. Several studies within nomadic work practices in the knowledge economy field will be potentially concerned with such issues. Therefore, a better understanding of the situations where technology successfully supports nomadic work practices and where it fails to do so is still required so that design concerns can be elaborated to inform the design and development of new technologies (de Carvalho, 2009). Investigations about the social impacts and the blurring between personal and professional life caused by the use of technology are yet another direction for further research in the field (Cosmobilities, 2009; Cousins & Robey, 2005; Davis, 2002).<br />
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CONCLUSION This chapter presented a review on nomadic work practices in the knowledge economy and the potential support technology can give to workers who adopt such practices. It defines nomadic workers as a category of mobile workers who use<br />
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the mobility of the workplace strategy in carrying out their productive activities. In so doing, nomadic workers are faced with issues concerning place-making activities, access to informational and technological resources as well as access to human resources. Computer technologies, especially ICTs, were presented as enablers for nomadicity in the knowledge economy. The ways in which some computer technologies may help nomadic workers in coping with the challenges they are faced with when it comes to mobility of the workplace were examined. In addition to that, issues of using several ICTs to conduct work activities were addressed and future research directions in the field of nomadic work practices in the knowledge economy were outlined. It can be concluded that the use of technology may give nomadic workers more control over the mobility of their workplace, allowing them to work across several locations as they need to move between places. However, such support must be treated with caution in order not to overestimate the benefits technology can offer. It should be remembered that the use of technology is a doubleedge sword that may cause undesirable effects as well. In view of such complexities, further research should be developed to enable a deeper understanding on how technology is succeeding or failing in supporting nomadic work practices and how failures can be addressed so that unwanted effects of technology use are avoided.<br />
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT This chapter was written as part of the activities for the ‘Nomadic/Work Life in the Knowledge Economy’ project, a joint project between the Interaction Design Centre and the Department of Sociology from the University of Limerick (UL), Ireland. The project is funded by the Irish Social Science Platform (ISSP) through the Institute for the Study of Knowledge in Society (ISKS). The<br />
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authors would like to thank ISSP/ISKS for the financial support.<br />
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Kakihara, M., & Sørensen, C. (2001). Expanding the ‘Mobility’ Concept. ACM SIGGROUP Bulletin, 22(3), 33–37. Kietzmann, J. (2008). Interactive Innovation of Technology for Mobile Work. European Journal of Information Systems, 17(3), 305–320. doi:10.1057/ejis.2008.18 Kim, W. C., & Mauborgne, R. (1999). Strategy, Value Innovation, and the Knowledge Economy. Sloan Management Review, 40(3), 41–54. Kleinrock, L. (1996). Nomadicity: Anytime, Anywhere in a Disconnected World. Mobile Networks and Applications, 1(4), 351–357. Kleinrock, L. (2001). Breaking loose. Communications of the ACM, 44(9), 41–46. doi:10.1145/383694.383705 Kristensen, J. F. (2002). Designing Pervasive Computing Technology - In a Nomadic Work Perspective, In P. Ljungstrand & L. E. Holmquist (Eds.), Adjunct Proceedings UBICOM 2002 (UBICOM 2002), (pp.61-62). Göteborg, Sweden: Viktoria Institute. Kristoffersen, S., & Lujungberg, F. (1999). Mobile Use of IT, In T. K. Käkölä (Ed.), Proceedings of the 22nd Information Systems Research Seminar In Scandinavia (IRIS22), (pp.271-284). Jyväskylä: Jyväskylä University Printing House. Lawence, E., & Er, M. (2007). Longitudinal Study of Mobile Technology Adoption: Evolution at Work, In Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Digital Society (ICDS ‘07), (pp.12-19). New York: IEEE Computer Society. Li, B. (2009). Online Storage and Content Distribution System at a Large Scale: Peer-Assistance and Beyond, In Proceedings of the 2009 9th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGRID ‘09), (pp.3). Washington, DC, USA: IEEE Computer Society.<br />
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Lilischkis, S. (2003). More Yo-yos, Pendulums and Nomads: Trends of Mobile and Multi-location Work in the Information Society. STAR. Milano, Databank. Issue Report No. 36: 65 p. Luff, P., & Heath, C. (1998). Mobility in Collaboration, In Proceedings of the 1998 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW ‘98), (pp.305-314). New York: ACM Press. Lyytinen, K., & Yoo, Y. (2002a). Issues and Challenges in Ubiquitous Computing. Communications of the ACM, 45(12), 62–96. Lyytinen, K., & Yoo, Y. (2002b). Research Commentary: The Next Wave of Nomadic Computing. Information Systems Research, 13(4), 377–388. doi:10.1287/isre.13.4.377.75 Mulligan, D. K., Schwartz, A., & Mondal, I. (2006). Risks of Online Storage. Communications of the ACM, 49(8), 112. doi:10.1145/1145287.1145318 O’Reilly, T. (2007). What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. Communications & Strategies, (1). Olson, G. M., & Olson, J. S. (2000). Distance matters. Human-Computer Interaction, 15(2), 139–178. doi:10.1207/S15327051HCI1523_4 Oulasvirta, A., & Sumari, L. (2007). Mobile Kits and Laptop Trays: Managing Multiple Devices in Mobile Information Work, In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘07), (pp.1127-1136). New York: ACM. Perry, M., & Brodie, J. (2006). Virtually Connected, Practically Mobile. In Andriessen, J. H. E., & Vartiainen, M. (Eds.), Mobile Virtual Work: A New Paradigm? (pp. 97–128). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. Perry, M., O’Hara, K., Sellen, A., Brown, B., & Harper, R. (2001). Dealing with Mobility: Understanding Access Anytime, Anywhere. [TOCHI]. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 8(4), 323–347. doi:10.1145/504704.504707<br />
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Richter, P., Meyer, J., & Sommer, F. (2006). Wellbeing and Stress in Mobile and Virtual Work. In Andriessen, J. H. E., & Vartiainen, M. (Eds.), Mobile Virtual Work: A New Paradigm? (pp. 232–252). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. Rossitto, C. (2008). Managing Work at Several Places: Understanding Nomadic Practices in Student Groups. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Stockholm University, Stockholm. Rossitto, C., & Eklundh, K. S. (2007). Managing Work at Several Places: A Case of Project Work in a Nomadic Group of Students, In Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics (ECCE ‘07), (pp.45-51). New York: ACM. Su, N. M., & Mark, G. (2008). Designing for Nomadic Work, In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ‘08), (pp.305-314). New York: ACM Press. Vartiainen, M. (2006). Mobile Virtual Work - Concepts, Outcomes and Challenges. In Andriessen, J. H. E., & Vartiainen, M. (Eds.), Mobile Virtual Work: A New Paradigm? (pp. 13–44). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. doi:10.1007/3-540-28365-X_2<br />
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Actant: any asset carried or accessed by nomadic workers that allows them to set up their workplace and conduct their work activities. Mobile phones, laptops and work documents are some examples of actants. Contextual Mobility: the shift from a context of interaction, i.e. a frame situating or being situated by human activity, to another. Knowledge Economy Workers: people who generate economic benefits by working on knowledge production or by using knowledge or<br />
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knowledge-based tools to develop their productive activities. The work is done by means of intellectual skills rather than physical labor. Examples of knowledge economy workers are managers, analysts, computer scientists, researchers and academics. Mobile Workers: people who move across time, space and context in order to develop their work activities. Nomadic Workers: people who use the mobility of workplace as a strategy for performing productive activities across different locations. They move their workplace to locations where necessary resources for their work, such as time, space and other people, are available. Spatial Mobility: the movement across different locations. It concerns the physical motion from a space to another. Temporal Mobility: the ability of approaching activities of interest in suitable times. It has to do with synchronous and asynchronous interactions. Virtual Mobility: spatial, temporal or contextual mobility across the cyberspace, i.e. the electronic environments generated by the use of ICTs. It refers to the use different on-line software tools in order to reach informational, technological and human resources located remotely without moving physically. Workplace: the combination of physical and virtual spaces with tools and materials for work and human experiences resulting in a place where work activities can be carried out. A table in a Café may be considered a workplace once the necessary tools for work are available and the worker experience that space so that their work tasks are accomplished.<br />
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ENDNOTE 1<br />
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Chapter 26<br />
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Interperception - Get all the Environments Rummenigge Dantas Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil Luiz Marcos Gonçalves Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil Claudio Schneider Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil Aquiles Burlamaqui Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil Ricardo Dias Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil Hugo Sena Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil Julio cesar Melo Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil<br />
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ABSTRACT We present in this chapter the I-GATE architecture, a new approach, which includes a set of rules and software architecture, to connect users from different interfaces and devices in the same virtual environment, transparently, even with low capacity of resources. The system detects the user resources and provides transformations on the data in order for its visualization in 3D, 2D and textual-only (1D) interfaces. This allows users from any interface to get a connection in the system using any device and to access and exchange information with other users (including ones with other interface types) in a straightforward way, without need to changing hardware or software. We formalize the problem, including modeling, implementation, and usage of the system, also introducing some applications that we have created and implemented in order to evaluate our proposal. We have used these applications in cell phones, PDAs, Digital Television, and heterogeneous computers, using the same architecture, with success. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch026 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.<br />
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INTRODUCTION New devices with more and more computational power become commercially available in the market every day. Most of these devices are able to connect with many heterogeneous networks. Most connections allow the devices to run multi-user applications. These applications are very important for nowadays communication. The ways of interaction promoted by this kind of application has changed the course of the human communication. The chat applications and multi-user virtual environments are some examples of this type of application. Computer networks are the channels that promote the growth of the multi-user systems. One of the first examples of a multi-user system is the MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) [Wolf, 2008] that is a system developed in 1978 by researchers from Essex University [Bartle, 1999]. The MUD is a kind of game that uses textual description for representing rooms, objects, and game characters. It is a merge of role-playing games [Fine, 2002] and chat rooms. MUD uses a textual visual (output) interface. In the next two decades after the birth of MUD, the visual (output) interface for multi-user virtual environments becomes 2D and 3D, consecutively. The focuses of these applications are games. But, one of the examples with 3D visual interface was developed to be a browser of the Internet: Active Worlds [Ensor, 2003]. At that time the computer networks all converge to the Internet and it becomes the channel that provides the mature of multi-user systems. Currently, there are virtual environments still with 3D, 2D and textual interfaces for visualization in the Internet. This can be explained by the fact of the visual interfaces with more complex graphics need more hardware and software resources. Not all the users have such requirements. Therefore, these users seek for environments with more simple graphics capabilities.<br />
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Virtual environments (or games) with low level capabilities can be useful to run in a less complex computational device. Besides the PC (Personal Computer) other devices with an embedded system [Ganssle, 2007], such as the mobile phones and IDTV (interactive digital television) set-top boxes [O’Brien, 1999] also allow connection with the internet. Put together all of these devices connected in the same network we can create a much more accessible shared virtual environment, by using an adequate version of the virtual environment in each device The integration and interaction between several different devices characterizes a ubiquitous/ pervasive application [Weiser, 1991]. This is only possible by using a middleware [Vinoski, 2004]. This software layer recognizes and interacts with all devices transparently. The main qualities of a middleware for pervasive applications are interoperability, scalability, reuse, adaptability and portability [Niemelä & Vaskivuo, 2004]. Furthermore, other characteristics are applied to pervasive middleware, like spontaneous interaction, context management, transparent interaction to the user and invisibility [da Costa et al., 2005]. The Interperception [Azevedo et al., 2006] defines an approach in order to solve the problem of allowing the creation of shared virtual environments to run in personal computers. The architecture and communication protocol defined by the interperception paradigm allows any user to connect with a virtual environment by three different visual interfaces: 3D, 2D and textual. In this chapter, we extend the interperception model, getting it to run a shared virtual environment in different visual interfaces and multiple computational devices. This newly proposed approach allows the integration of users connected to the Internet in the same environment even if using different client applications. These client programs can be developed in different platforms (programming language) that promote the interoperability of the system.<br />
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So, in order to solve the heterogeneity problem, our main contribution is an architecture that allows users with different kinds of interfaces and devices to interact to each other in the same (shared) virtual environment. With this architecture it is possible to manage the diversity of users, devices and connections. Our approach allows the creation of a pervasive environment for multi-user virtual environments (including games). We called this architecture I-GATE (Interperception - Get All The Environments) that will be introduced in the next sections.<br />
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BACKGROUND Textual communication is the way of interaction that first appeared in most on-line, multi-user systems. The MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) is the pioneer using this approach. Created in 1978, it has been defined as the standard interface by multi-player games developers [Dalmau, 2003] at least by one decade. The Habitat [Morningstar, 1991], which became first available as beta test in 1987, represents the birth of the 2D GUI (Graphical User Interface) for the development of on-line multi-user systems. The Habitat uses the same idea of the MUD: joining role-playing games and chat. It has started a huge virtual community [Renninger et. al., 2002] on the web. The Habitat is the first 2D game that has allowed a large amount of players to interact in the same environment. The next generation of multi-user systems is marked by a challenge: the rising of 3D multi-user interfaces. These systems have appeared in the age of the Internet. They also demand the capability of allowing many users to be connected simultaneously. Active Worlds can be considered as a pioneer on the use of 3D multi-user environments. Created to be a 3D web Browser, it is further converted in a virtual environment. In fact, nowadays there are on-line multi-user systems using the three kinds<br />
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of visual interfaces (textual, 2D and 3D). The birth of a new kind of graphical interface does not declare the death of the older interface models. This can be explained by the fact that there are clients with different hardware resources besides different needs and preferences. The difference of hardware, necessities and preferences of users in a computational environment is the great problem to be solved in a distributed system [Tanenbaum 2007]. In response to this problem some solutions were proposed. The RPC is one of these solutions. The traditional RPC [St. Lauren et al., 2001] model is a fundamental concept in distributed computing. It is used in middleware platforms such as CORBA [Lang et al., 2002], Java RMI [Grosso, 2002], Microsoft DCOM [Peiris et al., 2007], and others. The goal of RPC (Remote Procedure Call) is to enable the interaction between two processes running on different machines like if they are running locally. RPC is based on the synchronous interaction model. But some applications require asynchronous interaction. To answer the demand for such applications, an alternative mechanism to the RPC emerged. This mechanism called Message Oriented Middleware or MOM [Curry, 2004] provides a simple method of communication between different software entities. MOM can be defined as an infrastructure middleware that provides the ability of exchanging messages, and provides distributed communication based on the model of asynchronous interaction. Clients of a system based on MOM can send and receive messages from and to other customers through a server that acts as an intermediary. By promoting the integration of heterogeneous environments, we can create a pervasive approach. Some pervasive middleware and applications have also been proposed as the project Aura [Garlan et al., 2002]. This approach tries to avoid distractions on users by creating a context-based adaptive environment. Aura was designed for pervasive environments involving wireless connections,<br />
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portable computers or not, and intelligent space. However, Project Aura failed to supply full featured pervasive middleware due to its approach for focusing several pervasive aspects. Nowadays, trends are to develop middleware’s and frameworks for specifically problems, even basing such specific models in more general models. AlfredO [Rellermeyer, 2008] is a middleware architecture that allows users to interact in a flexible way with other electronic devices. The proposed middleware aids scalability, flexibility, device independence, security, efficiency and easy administration. The system wraps three main mechanisms: a software distribution model based in service; a multi-layer service architecture and a presentation model. To validate the architecture two applications were coded: MouseController and AlfredOShop. The last one is an application prototype to control information in cell phones display. The work of Al-Jaroodi et. al. [Al-Jaroodi, 2008] applies collaborative agents in resource discovering mechanisms. The original proposed framework defines a hierarchical structure for self organization. This framework, however, relies on the existence of at least one static reachable node. So another framework is proposed where nodes could move. The framework, dynamically, creates and maintains resources. To this end, each group chooses a leader according to some attributes relevant to the system. The authors use the lowest rate of mobility as criterion. The leader can communicate with other leaders. Unfortunately, the authors do not show any application that uses this framework, even though, the framework proposed is relevant to pervasive environment creation in heterogeneous context. In the last few years many approaches have appeared proposing the creation of distributed virtual environment for game application. In order to put together users of different devices in a distributed system this approaches presents software solutions for make possible this kind of games.<br />
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Pervasive game is one of these approaches that define a new kind of game extending the concept of pervasive computing to a game environment [Benford et al. 2005]. In the pervasive games, mobile devices and sensors allow a new game experience extending the (digital) game space to the real world. The main focus of pervasive game is to allowing a new game experience by creating a mixed reality environment for games. A genre of pervasive game called cross-media games [Lindt et al. 2005] is focused on the large variety of game consoles, mobility and other devices that can be used together allowing a new game experience. The above work presents a study about games where the players have different modes to play, that are provided by different devices. The players can communicate to each other via SMS. The use of a GPS device allows users to see the position of each other in the game environment. As the cross-media games are a genre of pervasive game, it aims the creation of a mixed reality approach for a small game environment. By integrating the ideas of pervasive games and cross-media games, the PM2G games [Trinta et al. 2006] define specific scenarios for pervasive games that use different devices. For each used device, the PM2G proposes a different game environment that is adequate to that device interface. These scenarios are also adequate to the network available. Since that each scenario provides a different mini-game, the result of each mini-game is archived causing the evolution of a wide game environment that is shared and viewed by all gamers. Following the idea of a shared game creation, the Cross-platform [Han et al. 2005] proposes an engine to develop 3D games accessible to different platforms. The work presents an architecture for multi-user games where the player can access the game from different devices and share the same game environment. However, this architecture uses a single server to provide to the players the capability of interacting in the same game envi-<br />
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ronment, in spite of their console. Yet, the work only focuses on games with 3D interfaces while our approach abstracts the visualization interface used in the game. None of the previous approaches works on the usability of games, which is an important issue that arises with the great diversity of players. The universally accessible game is a new theory for the design of games to be used in any platform and by any user [Grammenos et al. 2009]. In other words, this theory matches the concept of universal design [Wolfgang et al. 2001] with games. Note that a game made according to the rules of universal games has only an instance: the game has a universal version that is adequate for any use user and platform. This is the great difference from the kind of model we propose here, that is the use of different versions of the same game. Interperception is a very recent concept, which is related to the translation of messages to different interfaces of a same environment, in multi-user (even massive) applications. Due to the fact that it is recent, there are yet few games which implement this concept. But, by analyzing the related works presented here, we can see that there is<br />
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a progressive convergence to it. So, in order to explore this convergence we present in Table 1 a comparison between our approach and the other cited in this background Section. Table 1 compares the approaches through six main issues: Devices, that means the different devices supported by the approach; Visual Interface is related with the type of visual (output) interface; Network, which defines the different types of networks allowed by the approach; Persistence, that means the possibility of the environment to storage data about the past events and create a shared persistent environment for the users; Interoperability that is the possibility of an approach to let a client be made in any platform, which allows the environment to run in any device; Accessibility that tells whether the approach provides tools for letting users with disabilities to use the game. As we can see in Table 1, the I-GATE, our proposal, is the only approach that attends Interoperability and Accessibility qualities at the same time. Besides this, the I-GATE can also run in any Devices with any Visual Interface and any Network.<br />
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Table 1. Comparison between related work and the proposed approach €€€€€Approach<br />
<br />
€€€€€Devices<br />
<br />
€€€€€Visual Interface<br />
<br />
€€€€€Network<br />
<br />
€€€€€Persistence<br />
<br />
€€€€€Interoperability<br />
<br />
€€€€€Accessibility<br />
<br />
€€€€€Pervasive Games<br />
<br />
€€€€€PC, Mobile, AR system<br />
<br />
€€€€€3D, 2D and textual<br />
<br />
€€€€€LAN, WAN<br />
<br />
€€€€€no<br />
<br />
€€€€€no<br />
<br />
€€€€€no<br />
<br />
€€€€€Cross-media<br />
<br />
€€€€€PC, Mobile, AR system<br />
<br />
€€€€€3D, 2D and textual<br />
<br />
€€€€€LAN, WAN<br />
<br />
€€€€€no<br />
<br />
€€€€€no<br />
<br />
€€€€€no<br />
<br />
€€€€€Videogame consoles<br />
<br />
€€€€€3D<br />
<br />
€€€€€Internet, LAN, WAN<br />
<br />
€€€€€yes<br />
<br />
€€€€€no<br />
<br />
€€€€€no<br />
<br />
€€€€€PM2G<br />
<br />
€€€€€PC, Mobile<br />
<br />
€€€€€2D, Textual<br />
<br />
€€€€€Internet, LAN, WAN<br />
<br />
€€€€€yes<br />
<br />
€€€€€no<br />
<br />
€€€€€no<br />
<br />
€€€€€Universally Accessible<br />
<br />
€€€€€any<br />
<br />
€€€€€Not applicable<br />
<br />
€€€€€Internet<br />
<br />
€€€€€no<br />
<br />
€€€€€no<br />
<br />
€€€€€yes<br />
<br />
€€€€€I-GATE<br />
<br />
€€€€€any<br />
<br />
€€€€€3D, 2D and textual<br />
<br />
€€€€€Internet, LAN, WAN<br />
<br />
€€€€€yes<br />
<br />
€€€€€yes<br />
<br />
€€€€€yes<br />
<br />
€€€€€Cross-platform<br />
<br />
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THE I-GATE ARCHITECTURE In this work we propose a middleware that allows any multi-user real time application to be executed in different devices. This integration creates a pervasive environment where the proposed application gets available to the users all the time. Figure 1 shows an example of a configuration where a group of people with different needs are all connected to the Internet. The environment proposed in this figure is prepared for the integration of cell phones, personal computers and set-top boxes (or Digital Television). Also, it is prepared for the interaction of different people, in different ages, with different necessities. So, our system will must provide different forms of interaction and visualization for the users. Basically, in the example configuration proposed in Figure 1, we have three layers where we can organize the differences between each user: • <br />
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People Layer: each user is unique, and has different needs. As an example, some<br />
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Figure 1. Heterogeneity of an environment<br />
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• <br />
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contents are prohibited for a teenager or a child, an interface with voice synthesis is demanded for a blind person, a family or a group of users sharing a device at the same time demands different ways of interaction, a man from the United States needs different language and icons than a women from Japan does. In other words, accessibility, age and cultural aspects must be considered if one is aiming at developing a good interface. Thus, each user needs a customized interface according to his/her necessities. Device Layer: depending on financial resources, occasion and user preferences the choice for a device rather than another may be different for each user. Generating an heterogeneous scenario where smart phones, mobile phones, personal computers, set-top boxes, PDAs and other devices with different hardware resources (processor, input/output devices, memory) have been used.<br />
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• <br />
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Connection Layer: this layer considers the network, protocols and hardware features used by each device. Examples of the variety of requirements from this layer are users connected by broadband, GPRS, or dial up connections.<br />
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Thus we have a heterogeneous environment connecting different people using different devices under different connections, although appearing a common element: Internet. By itself the Internet does not solve the problem of allowing a same application to be accessed through all the interfaces of this environment. A software architecture is demanded in order to solve this issue. This architecture, which is shown in Figure 2, is called I-GATE. It allows a user to choose an interface and device to perceive the environment, according to his resources or necessities. The system provides<br />
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all transformations needed for each kind of interface or device, allowing users to see each other in a transparent way - what makes collaboration possible in this system. In this chapter, we intend to show all the formalism involved in the transformations between interfaces, as well as details of the architecture briefly presented in Figure 2. This architecture shows many kinds of clients connected to a server called InterP Server. The Server provides the environment to the clients. Between the environment and the clients we can see two software layers: the Slaves and the Portals. The Slaves are sub-servers that provide the system scalability. The Portals are attached to these subservers to work in the translation of the messages exchanging between the clients and servers. This translation is done in order to adequate them to the corresponding client interfaces. In fact, this<br />
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Figure 2. I-GATE architecture<br />
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component called Portal transforms the messages that arrive from a dimension to another.<br />
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A. Messages Translation When the Portal discovers that a message is coming from a user with the same interface of the one to which this Portal is attached, the message is not translated. This solution reduces the amount of processing done in Portal. The Portal transforms messages related to addition of avatars in the environment and their motion. Avatar adding messages use the TCP protocol. They are control messages that are sent when a user enters the world, when a user jumps to another room or when a new user enters previously to the creation of the environment on the client application. These messages cannot be lost during their transmission. That is the reason for using use TCP protocol. An avatar motion message uses the UDP protocol and it is used to execute affine transformations on the environment, which guarantee the correct movement of the avatars. This message use UDP protocol because many package of this kind are sent, but some of these packages can be lost without serious problems to the visualization of the avatar movement.<br />
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the instance of User to the appropriated interface and set the obtained information. For example, a Portal attached to a 2D client receives a message from a 3D client. First, Portal creates an instance of User. After, it gets the information coming with the message (the avatar image, name, and position). Finally, it converts the User to User2D and set that information in the new instance of User2D.<br />
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C. The translation of Transformation Messages To convert a position from a dimension to another we define some rules: • <br />
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• • <br />
<br />
• <br />
<br />
• <br />
<br />
In the 2D environment, each tile from the map is square shaped and has pre-defined dimensions; In the PercepCom2D we define these dimensions as 64×64 pixels; The position of an avatar in the 2D interface is defined relative to the top left side of the image (the origin); In the 3D environment, position is defined relative to the center of the avatar (the origin); The environments must have the origin in the same position; The area of the environments must be proportional to all objects.<br />
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B. The Translation of Adding Avatar Messages<br />
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• <br />
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This kind of message contains information such as the avatar name, its position, kind of hardware and other information, which depends on the type of interface from where this message comes from. For example, in the 3D interface an avatar has information about its orientation but a 1D avatar does not. The three types of users are a generalization of the super class User. When a new user has to be added in the environment a new instance of User is created by Portal. After, Portal obtains (in the message it receives) the information needed to create the avatar according to the interface type that it is attached to.↜Finally, Portal converts (casts)<br />
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With these rules, we define a set of equations to convert a point from 2D to 3D and the opposite. A position in the 3D environment is defined as a tuple (3d.x, 3d.y, 3d.z) and a point in 2D is defined as a tuple (2d.x, 2d.y). The equations for implementing these transformations are:<br />
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1. 3d.x = (2d.x+ TS/2)/R 2. 3d.y = predefined 3. 3d.z = (2d.y+ TS/2)/R, where TS is the length of the Tile Side and R is the ratio between the length of the 2D environment area and<br />
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the 3D environment area and the predefined value depends on the avatar size. With this equations, if an avatar in the 2D environment is at position (64, 64), in the 3D space it will be on the position (1,92; predefined height; 1,92). Coordinate X in the 2D interface is mapping to X in the 3D one. Coordinate Y in the 2D is mapping to Z in the 3D. The Y (height) of 3D is pre-defined because motion in vertical direction maybe not implemented in the 2D client. Half of TS defines a point in the center of the sprite of the 2D avatar and this measure is needed to define the center of a 3D avatar. The ratio R defines the rate of pixels, that is the measure unit in the 2D environment, to meters, the measure unit in the 3D environment. In the client application used to validate the I-GATE, we define this ratio to be 1 pixel in the 2D interface for each 2 cm in the 3D model. We note that movement is an essential issue in the 2D and 3D interfaces but can be abstracted in the textual interface. However, we store information about positions (of objects and avatars) as well in the PercepCom1D to make the navigation through the environment more accurate. With this position we can for example define an interpolation to simulate the movement executed by a user in the 1D interface.↜When a user in the 1D sends a tag in order to make a motion, the controller of this environment gathers the initial and the final position and sends a message to the server. The server receives this message, calculates the interpolation and sends a message to the respective Portal. This Portal receives a message with all positions necessary to perform the movement. These positions will be used by the receiver controller to generate a flow of movement. We define positions in the 1D with the same type of variables used in the 2D interface. This decision makes possible the mapping of a position in the interface 1D directly to the 2D. By using the rules defined above we can convert a<br />
<br />
position from 2D to 3D, so we can also convert from 1D to 3D.<br />
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IMPLEMENTATION OF THE I-GATE To validate the model proposed in this work, we develop a virtual multiuser environment intended to execute in all the platforms presented in the system architecture, above. To turn possible this environment implementation, we developed a hierarchical and interoperable framework needed to implement the needed interoperable server. This framework called HN2NInt is based on a previous version of the HN2N framework [Burlamaqui, 2006], called HN2NBeta. The HN2Nbeta sends and receive serializable objects, what constrains it to run only applications developed in Java. To make an interoperable middleware we had to change the way communication is done between the applications. We have done that by defining a new binary protocol that allows communication between different devices and languages. We solve here several problems as the ones related to binary data storage and transmission, that is, codification in Big-Endian and Little-Endian from a language to another.<br />
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A. Messages Construction The definition of only the binary data format is not enough to ensure interoperability. Many languages send binary data over the network differently, such as strings. A string in C is just an array of characters while in Java strings are objects containing, in addition to the string itself, information about the encoding used. This allows the correctness of string transmission with programs developed by the same language but incorrect when using different languages. To solve this problem, we create a component that holds the Marshalling and Unmarshalling of the information to be exchanged between the programs. By using these components, the infor-<br />
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mation is stored in a unique way. This eliminates the ambiguity in the form how the data are sent and received by the applications. This component realizes the transformations needed for the correct interpretation of the binary information. The implementation of these components has to follow a protocol that will be specified later in this chapter. In the protocol proposed in this work, the following binary data are used: • • • • <br />
<br />
byte: 8 bits short: 16 bits int: 32 bits string: array of characters<br />
<br />
Considering the above types of data, in order to store information, we perform some transformations on the information to ensure that the information is written / read in a unique way. The programmer receives information about the data type and language a user is using, what avoids making unnecessary changes to data structures. • • • <br />
<br />
Byte: no transformation short and int: they are transmitted using the Big-Endian format string: first is transmitted the range (number of characters) of the string in BigEndian; after, only the characters that form the string.<br />
<br />
The reading and writing of messages are done in a similar way. For sending and receiving a message in the server and in the application, both have to access only this software component. This restriction ensures that a message is always transmitted in the format defined above. By doing in this way, the changing of the way of how data is transmitted by the application becomes transparent. This allows us to improve or modify the form of how data is transmitted without modifying the applications. For example, these components can add encryption mechanisms for a more secure communication of information, taking into ac-<br />
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count that the encryption will be known on both sides and implemented in a similar way in both languages.<br />
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CASE STUDIES To verify the theory presented in this chapter we develop two case studies. In the first case study the I-GATE is applied in the construction of a chat application. In the second case study the I-GATE is applied in the construction of a collaborative virtual environment called Virtual Garage. In this section the results achieved in these two studies cases are presented.<br />
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A. Case Study 1: Chat Application To validate the proposed protocol and architecture, we have developed a chat application with versions in different platforms. These versions represent three different client applications: a client in C language, a client in Java SE API and a client in J2ME API, with the C and Java SE clients running in desktop computers. The J2ME client is running in a cell phone. The Java SE client is developed for running as an applet too. The server is developed in the Java language. This server can receive and treat data from the three kinds of clients explained above. In a first experiment, the server is running in a PC. Three clients are executed in each version. Each client access the server with the same chat application, with the same information shown in the client interface. During this experiment, the clients talk between each other. When a new message arrives, all the clients were capable to see and answer the message. Besides, each user was capable to see the user list with the users connected at the same time.<br />
<br />
B. Case Study 2: Garage Virtual The Virtual Garage is a virtual collaborative environment for dissemination of music new-<br />
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comers and amateur bands. This environment is designed to perform virtual music festivals. The Virtual Garage name comes from the fact that many bands in Brazil start career practicing in real garages. The Garage environment has a main hall and five secondary rooms. For secondary rooms twenty sculptures in the form of musical notes are arranged. Each of these sculptures is associated with some music pre-selected by the judges. When a visitor approaches these sculptures the music starts to run in the client application of this visitor. Besides being able to travel the halls of the environment and listen to music, a User (visitor) can also chat with other users who are traveling in the place through a tool chat that is coupled to a display interface. Another possible action in this environment is to vote in a current music listening. To realize the Garage experiment we made a test with four users connected to the environment. The user with the nick “Sheila”, connected by a computer, chose the 3D interface and the avatar “Dancer”. The vision that Sheila has about the<br />
<br />
environment is shown in Figure 3(A). Another user with the nick “julio687” is connected by a computer too. The user “julio687” chooses the textual interface and the avatar “BlackPower”. The vision that “julio687” has about the environment is shown in Figure 3(D). The user “Peter” is connect by a mobile phone, and has chosen the 2D interface and the avatar “Punk”. The vision that “Peter” has about the environment is shown in Figure 3(C). At last, the user with the nick “Kaka” gets connected by an IDTV device and chooses the 2D interface and the avatar “Dancer”. The vision of “Kaka” about the environment is shown on the Figure 3(B). Next, we ask the four users to travel in the environment, listening to music and voting. The users know that there exist other users in the environment and they can talk by way of chat communication. Users are not informed the type of interface or device that the other users have chosen. At the end of this experiment, we ask the real users to tell us on how they perceive the interface or device used by the others. We also<br />
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Figure 3. Garage experiment. 3(A) Web 3D interface. 3(B) IDTV 2D interface. 3(C) Mobile 2D interface. 3(D) Web Textual interface.<br />
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evaluate the time and the number of lines spent by each user and the number of rooms visited. The results are shown in Table 2. Results in Table 2 show that most users can interact with each other connected by distinct interfaces. All users shown here could use the tool for conversation. On average, users are in textual interface talking less and this can be explained by the fact that all the interactions in this interface is given by the keyboard, not just the conversation itself. The 2D users are the ones that have visited more rooms. This can be explained by the form the navigation is done in this environment, using the mouse, and the display of the environment is in third person. In the 3D interface, the navigation is done by pressing directional arrows using the keypad and the view is first person, so some users feel some difficult for navigating in the environment. The number of classrooms visited is lower in 1D and this can be explained by the time lost by users typing commands to travel the rooms. It can also be taken into account the lack of visual attraction in this interface. The time spent by users inside the environment is higher in 3D, followed by 1D and after 2D. This can be explained by the fact that the 2D interface makes the navigation easier and therefore users can visit the environment without losing much time in order to know the users of this interface that visited more rooms. To measure the transparency of the collaboration, at the end of browsing, the User is questioned about which interface the other users with whom he/she is interacting are using. All users of this<br />
<br />
run claimed that the other users have used the same interface as they. As all accesses are formed by mixed groups of users, here we could testify the Transparency in all interactions, i.e., no User could actually verify in which interface display the other users are.<br />
<br />
ISSUES, CONTROVERSIES, PROBLEMS Usually, the use of a more complex graphical interface requires a more powerful hardware. So a user has either to upgrade his hardware or to choose a system with a simpler graphical interface. Another way to solve this problem is to create versions of the system with different visual interfaces. However, current solutions to this approach do not connect the users into the same virtual environment. In other words, users connected in the 2D version cannot interact with users from the 3D version of such systems, so, this solution does not create a shared virtual environment. To make the environment shared it is necessary to create a distributed system. The distributed computing has many challenges. The equipment variety, operating systems variety, among others problems bring a great challenge (perhaps the biggest one): to make distinct devices communicable. These devices probably have different operating systems and architectures. The applications supported by these devices are developed in different languages.<br />
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Table 2. Evaluating the collaborative actions on the garage €€€€€User €€€€€Sheila €€€€€Julio687<br />
<br />
€€€€€Device<br />
<br />
€€€€€Visual Interface<br />
<br />
€€€€€Visited Rooms<br />
<br />
€€€€€Time spent<br />
<br />
€€€€€Lines talked<br />
<br />
€€€€€Perceive<br />
<br />
€€€€€PC<br />
<br />
€€€€€3D<br />
<br />
3<br />
<br />
1009<br />
<br />
59<br />
<br />
no<br />
<br />
€€€€€PC<br />
<br />
€€€€€textual<br />
<br />
€€€€€2<br />
<br />
€€€€€900<br />
<br />
€€€€€1<br />
<br />
€€€€€no<br />
<br />
€€€€€Peter<br />
<br />
€€€€€Mobile phone<br />
<br />
€€€€€2D<br />
<br />
€€€€€2<br />
<br />
€€€€€1052<br />
<br />
€€€€€24<br />
<br />
€€€€€no<br />
<br />
€€€€€Kaka<br />
<br />
€€€€€IDTV<br />
<br />
€€€€€2D<br />
<br />
€€€€€1<br />
<br />
€€€€€514<br />
<br />
€€€€€10<br />
<br />
€€€€€no<br />
<br />
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<br />
To make possible the communication between devices with different hardware and software platforms, it is necessary allow the data exchange between them. It also need the all devices understand the semantics of the data exchanged. It is necessary to reduce the complexity inherent to distributed computing due to several factors as: the variety of equipment, systems with heterogeneous hardware, distinct operating systems and possible differences in networks architecture. In response to this communication challenge, due to heterogeneity and distributed computing problems, some possible technologies ware described in the Background section. Here we discuss the issues of those technologies.<br />
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A. Systems Based on RPC With the Internet popularization, software systems tends to become distributed, and also emerges the need for scalability, crossing the geographical, organizational and business traditional limits, which makes the demand on the infrastructure of communication grows exponentially. Modern systems operate in complex environments with multiple programming languages, hardware platforms, operating systems and demands. These systems must provide flexibility of distribution, reliability, high performance and security while maintaining a high quality of service. In such environments, the direct approach of mechanisms like RPC will fail quickly in front of the current challenges. The RPC-based approaches suffer from one crucial problem: synchronous communication. This restriction of RPC-based systems reduces the performance of the system. It’s occurs because the synchronous communication implies the constant provision of the server and client. Another problem common to RPC-based systems is the strong coupling of their components. Synchronous communication contributes to making a system based on RPC strong coupled. The advent of the Internet favored growth of distributed<br />
<br />
systems. This factor also comes with the need to ensure that the system can grow on a large scale. The growth in large scale is difficult the use of strong coupled architectures.<br />
<br />
B. Use of Middleware Based Approaches Another problem to be solved is related to application developers who want a unique interface for programming. Solve this problem allows the creation of platform independent applications, which eliminates the complexity of specific function calls to a particular operating system. This interface with some high-level programming degree would abstract the complexities of network and protocol allowing the developer to focus only on the application, being more productive and having to develop a single application that would run on multiple platforms. The answer to this need is the middleware. Middleware services for distributed systems are based on two solutions: 1) Creation of interfaces for common programming, making easier to the application becomes portable between devices and servers. 2) Standardization of communication protocols. The origin of middleware is to develop Processing Systems Transactions (English Transaction Processing System or TPS) [Bernstein, 1996]. In this type of system a number of smaller operations are treated as if it were a single operation. This mechanism facilitates the writing of scalable and reliable transactional applications. The main problem with this approach is its inflexibility. To ensure the quality this type of system, we must ensure that all transactions are executed in same way. The rigidity of such system led to the development of middleware systems for use in applications more flexible. This evolution came the message oriented middleware.<br />
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C. Message-Oriented Middleware (MOM) To answer the demand of the asynchronous systems, an approach called Message Oriented Middleware was proposed. MOM provides a simple method of communication between different software entities. MOM can be defined as an infrastructure middleware that provides the ability of exchanging messages, and provides distributed communication based on the model of asynchronous interaction. The use of MOM allows the creation of a loosely coupled system. With this feature is possible to attach new module to the system without modify the whole system.<br />
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SOLUTIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS The middleware developed in this research belongs to the category of Message-Oriented Middleware, MOM. A client of a system based on MOM can send and receive messages to other clients through a layer of middleware that acts as an intermediary. This same layer can serve as an intermediary between clients and servers. By the MOM architecture, the client and server need not know the location of each the other. This feature makes the system transparent. The lack of direct links between applications the system makes it loosely coupled. The loosely coupling is also guaranteed by the asynchronous communication model. Therefore, any time one of system components can be removed without damaging the operating of the system.↜New components can be added as well. We can observe that the different approaches based on middleware have properties required for each approach. Messages oriented approach provides asynchronous communication, rivaling the RPC model. However, CORBA, although RPC-based application allows us to create messages oriented applications. Thus we can conclude<br />
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410<br />
<br />
that CORBA is also an approach based middleware. In fact the RPC itself can also be seen as a middleware-based approach for synchronous applications. The great difference between each approach is properties guaranteed in. In other words, the services provided. At the beginning of the discussion on middleware-based systems, we say that the middleware systems offer high level services, platform-independent and reusable properties. After present each approach and list their properties, it becomes clear the statement above. Therefore, we conclude that the properties represent a middleware services that are provided to the layers of the system between the same. We call “middleware services” because they are below the application layer and above the operating systems, software and networking layers. They are usually arranged in layers. Each layer provides functions (services) for the above layer.<br />
<br />
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS The implementation of the I-GATE promotes many other studies. The first is the study of game fairness of interperceptive games. The development of game of this type appears as a new paradigm in the area of game development. However, the success of this game is connected to a more detailed study of the techniques to make it balanced for all participants. In defining the I-GATE process, we viewed the environment should be the same on all interfaces. Thus, you can convert the avatars a display interface to another, without much inconvenience. But if the avatars were converted to a different environment completely different conversion rules defined here would not be valid. Thus, studies and developments to resolve this problem can also be pointed out as future developments in order to improve the proposal. In this case, the use and adoption of a standard for modeling the avatars can be one of the paths chosen.<br />
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Other possible improvement to be done is the creation of a supervisory tool as a complement to the framework. This tool could be used for monitoring the network collecting data on operations and displaying it to a human supervisor of the network. Coupled to this tool, a mechanism may be developed to implement a balancer for better distributing the network traffic based on data collected, so that decisions could be made automatically routing network flow according to a current demand.<br />
<br />
CONCLUSION We propose the I-GATE, an approach that allows several, different users to be connected to the same system, even if using different interfaces and devices. We propose and implement a schema in which transformations are provided on the data coming from one interface to another of a different type. We have developed tools for data reduction, allowing easier loading of environments and objects representations. With the Interperception tools, even a user connected with a 1D interface can set position in the environment, thus seen by other users using interfaces with higher quality of resources. Pervasive computing is a promising area. However quality is still an open issue, difficult to reach in general pervasive applications. The middleware proposed here catches together some of these qualities to create a system that is pervasive for virtual reality applications. Our idea for forthcoming versions is to evolve the proposed middleware onto a framework. This will enable the creation of pervasive multi-user applications to run on heterogeneous platforms, for which the middleware model is thought and implemented as such. Yet, game fairness could be a topic of research mainly in games applications. That is, how a player with less resource capabilities and interfaces can have the same conditions in a game where<br />
<br />
there are other players with more computational power and sophisticated interfaces? This is still an open issue and will be explored further by our research group. To this end, in this chapter we have shown that there are rare applications with all of the components that an interperceptive, shared, virtual environment allows us to have (i.e. interdimensionality, accessibility, communication tools, and multiple users support). Most often, the environment has only a kind of interface available to the users. Yet, most researches invest in applications devoted for a specific group of users. In general, the ones with higher acquisition power, and left behind other users with less resource capabilities or even with disabilities. So here we have demonstrated that it is possible to integrate all of these users, thus allowing a little more of social inclusion.<br />
<br />
REFERENCES Al-Jaroodi, J., Kharhash, A., AlDhahiri, A., Shamisi, A., Dhaheri, A., AlQayedi, F., & Dhaheri, S. (2008). Collaborative resource discovery in pervasive computing environments.International Symposium on Collaborative Technologies and Systems (pp. 135–141). Irvine, CA: The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. Azevedo, S., Burlamaqui, A., Dantas, R., Schneider, C., Gomes, R., Melo, J. C., et al. (2006). Interperception on shared virtual environments. In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Virtual Environments, Human-Computer Interfaces and Measurements Systems (pp. 109 - 113). La Coruna: The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. Bartle, R. A. (1999). Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud. The first of a series of articles on Multi-User Dungeon. Retrieved June 10, 2009, from http:// mud.co.uk/richard/masep84.htm.<br />
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Benford, S., Mangekurth, C., & Ljungstrand, P. (2005). Bridging the physical and digital in pervasive gaming. Communications of the ACM, 48(3), 54–57. doi:10.1145/1047671.1047704 Bernstein, P. A. (1996). Middleware: A model for distributed system services. Communications of the ACM, 39(2), 86–98. doi:10.1145/230798.230809 Burlamaqui, A. M., Oliveira, M. A. M. S., Gonçalves, A. M. G., Lemos, G., & de Oliveira, J. C. (2006). A Scalable Hierarchical Architecture for Large Scale Multi-User Virtual Environments. In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Virtual Environments, Human-Computer Interfaces and Measurements Systems (pp. 114 119). La Coruna: The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. Curry, E. (2004). Message-Oriented Middleware. In Mahmoud, Q. H. (Ed.), Middleware for communications (pp. 1–26). West Sussex, UK: John Wiley and Sons. da Costa, C. A., Yamin, A. C., & Geyer, C. F. R. (2008). Toward a general software infrastructure for ubiquitous computing. IEEE Pervasive Computing / IEEE Computer Society [and] IEEE Communications Society, 7(1), 64–73. doi:10.1109/ MPRV.2008.21 Dalmau, D. S. (Ed.). (2003). Core techniques and algorithms in game programming. New York: New Riders. Ensor, J. (Ed.). (2003). Future Net: The Essential Guide to Internet and Technology Megatrends. Victoria, BC: Trafford Publishing. Fine, G. A. (Ed.). (2002). Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds. Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press. Ganssle, J. G. (Ed.). (2007). Embedded Systems. Barlington, MA: Elsevier Inc.<br />
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Garlan, D., Siewiorek, D. P., & Steenkiste, P. (2002). Project aura: Toward distraction-free pervasive computing. IEEE Pervasive Computing / IEEE Computer Society [and] IEEE Communications Society, 1(2), 22–31. doi:10.1109/ MPRV.2002.1012334 Grammenos, D., Savidis, A., & Stephanidis, C. (2009). Designing universally accessible games. ACM Comput. Entertain., 7(1). Grosso, W. (2002). Java RMI. O’Reilly. Han, J., In, H. P., & Woo, J.-S. (2005). Towards situationaware cross-platform ubi-game development. In. 8–13. Lang, U., & Schreiner, R. (2002). Developing secure distributed systems with CORBA. Artech House. Lindt, I., Ohlenburg, J., Pankoke-Babbatz, U., Ghellal, S., Oppermann, L., & Adams, M. (2005). Designing crossmedia games. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Gaming Applications in Pervasive Computing Environments. PERGAMES, 62–66. Mahmoud, Q. H. (2004). Middleware for Communications. Chichester, UK: John Willey and Sons Ltd.doi:10.1002/0470862084 Morningstar, C., & Randy, F. (1991). The lessons of lucasfilm’s habitat. In Benedikt, M. (Ed.), In Proceedings of Cyberspace: First Steps (pp. 273–302). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Niemelä, E., & Vaskivuo, T. (2004). Agile middleware of pervasive computing environments. In A. Tripathi (Ed.) Proceedings. Second IEEE Annual Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (pp. 192–197). Orlando, CA: The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.<br />
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O’Brien, J., Rodden, T., Rouncefield, M., & Hughes, J. (1999). At home with the technology: an ethnographic study of a set-top-box trial. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 6(3), 282–308. doi:10.1145/329693.329698 Peiris, C., Mulder, D., Cicoria, S., Bahree, A., & Pathak, N. (2007). Pro WCF: practical Microsoft SOA implementation. Apress. Proceedings of Pervasive2005 Rellermeyer, J. S., Riva, O., & Alonso, G. (2008). Alfredo: An architecture for flexible interaction with electronic devices. in Issarny, V., & Schantz, R. (Eds.), 9th International Middleware Conference (pp. 22–41). Leuven: Springer. Renninger, K. A., & Shumar, W. (Eds.). (2002). Building virtual communities: learning and change in cyberspace. New York: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511606373 St. Laurent, S., Johnston, J., & Dumbill, E. (2001) Programming web services with XML-RPC. New York: O’Reilly Media, Inc. Tanenbaum, A. S., & van Steen, M. (2007). Distributed systems: principles and paradigms. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. Trinta, F., Ferraz, C., & Ramalho, G. (2006). Middleware Services for Pervasive Multiplatform Networked Games. Singapore: Netgames’06. Trinta, F., Pedrosa, D., Ferraz, C., & Ramalho, G. (2008). Evaluating a middleware for crossmedia games. Comput. Entertain., 6(3), 1–19. doi:10.1145/1394021.1394033 Vinoski, S. (2004). An overview of middleware. In Llamos, A., & Strohmeier, A. (Eds.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Reliable Software Technologies - Ada-Europe (pp. 35–51). Berlin: Springer.<br />
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Völter, M., Kircher, M., & Zdun, U. (2005). Remote Patterns: Foundations of Enterprise, Internet and and Realtime Distributed Object Middleware. Chichester, UK: John Willey and Sons Ltd. Weiser, M. (1991). The computer for the twentyfirst century. Scientific American, 265(3), 94–102. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0991-94 Wolf, M. J. P. (Ed.). (2008). The Video Game Explosion: A History from Pong to Playstation and Beyond. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. Wolfgang, F. E., & Preiser, E. O. (2001). Universal design handbook. New York: McGraw-Hill handbooks.<br />
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Collaborative Interaction: A kind of interaction that allow people to work together in the resolution of a problem or act together in the same software application. Interperception: A software architecture and set of methodologies that allow the users of a virtual environment or game to share this environment through software clients with different visualization interface. Middleware: Software layer located between the operational system and the applications, it allows the execution of a application in different hardware platforms. Multimodal Interaction: A kind of interaction that allow the people to use different types of input devices to use software. Perception: The human capability of sense. Shared Virtual Environment: An multi-user virtual environment that is shared by all the users in real time. Visualization Interface: Interface of for visual output from any graphical software application.<br />
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Chapter 27<br />
<br />
CONNECTOR:<br />
<br />
A Geolocated Mobile Social Service Pedro Almeida University of Aveiro, Portugal<br />
<br />
Lidia Silva University of Aveiro, Portugal<br />
<br />
Jorge Abreu University of Aveiro, Portugal<br />
<br />
Melissa Saraiva University of Aveiro, Portugal<br />
<br />
Margarida Almeida University of Aveiro, Portugal<br />
<br />
Jorge Teixeira University of Aveiro, Portugal<br />
<br />
Maria Antunes University of Aveiro, Portugal<br />
<br />
Fernando Ramos University of Aveiro, Portugal<br />
<br />
ABSTRACT The widespread and availability of increasingly powerful mobile devices is contributing for the incorporation of new services and features on our daily communications and social relationships. In this context, geolocation of users and points of interest in mobile devices may contribute, in a natural way, to support either the mediation of remote conversations as the promotion of face-to-face meetings between users, leveraging social networks. The CONNECTOR system is based on geolocation data (people, content and activities), enabling users to create and develop their personal relations with other members of the CONNECTOR social network. Users, maps, sharing features and multimedia content are actors in this social network allowing CONNECTOR to address the promotion of geolocated social networks driven by physical proximity and common interests among users. This chapter discusses the work undertaken for the conceptualization and development of the CONNECTOR system. Preliminary evaluation results along with usage contexts are also presented. The chapter concludes with a discussion about future developments in geolocation and personalization in mobile communication services. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch027 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.<br />
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CONNECTOR<br />
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INTRODUCTION In this project, concepts such as “community”, “social network”, “aggregation” and “sharing of common activities” gain a special relevance. Socialization, a central issue in the aforementioned concepts, is supported through processes of communication based on different types of interaction: face-to-face interaction, mediated interaction and quasi-mediated interaction (Thompson, 1995). In traditional societies, where face-to-face interaction is dominant, socialization processes tend to be performed between people who know each other well, while in contemporary society individuals often interact with others, known or unknown through technological mediation: “today we interact more with our television screens and computer monitors than with the neighbours or members of the same community.” (Giddens, 2004, p.101). During the 70s of the XX century major technological developments in telecommunication and personal computer technology raised a new type of society, the network society (Castells, 1997) allowing the emergence of a new type of communication: Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). According to Wellman and Hampton (1999) network societies have more permeable boundaries; interactions often are with persons physically distant; social ties are supported between multiple networks; and hierarchies tend to be more flat and recursive (Wellman & Hampton, 1999; Wellman, 2000). The nature of CMC has some implications in terms of social relationships: it supports communities either with a broad spectrum of interests or with specialized concerns; CMC is useful to keep in contact people connected by weak ties; and proves to be useful in supporting both instrumental exchanges and complex interactions (Wellman & Hampton, 1999). With the advent of the Web 2.0 CMC has been, in a large extent, supported by social networking sites, such as Facebook, or MySpace where users articulate a list of contacts with whom they share a relation (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). In social<br />
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networking portals the emphasis is in the articulation, and visibility, of a person’s social network and interactions tend to occur predominantly with people already integrating the users’ extended social network (e.g.: friends; and friends-of-myfriends) (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). Nowadays, communication overcomes distance with increased support for mobility. With the invention of the telephone in 1876, it was possible for the first time in history to have realtime conversational interaction at a distance. (…) Over the years, the telephone has dramatically changed how people live their lives and see their world. (…) The telephone and its latest mobile incarnation have a unique place in the history of humanity’s development. (Katz & Aakhus, 2002, pp.1-2) In contemporary societies mobile communication has become mainstream and even omnipresent. Despite these developments individuals still feel the need to meet each other in a situation of face-to-face communication - Boden and Molotch (1994) describe this need by the compulsion to proximity – people subject themselves to extensive travel to be in situations of co-presence and experience face-to-face communication. What kind of relation do we have between mobile communication and the compulsion to proximity? Has the compulsion to proximity a relation with the perpetual contact promoted by mobile communication? It is important to emphasize that mobile communications are experiencing a new world – the wireless world - and a new age – the age of perpetual contact: The spread of mobile communication, most obtrusively as cell phones but increasingly in other wireless devices, is affecting people’s lives and relationships. Cell phones speed the place and efficiency of life, but also allow more flexibility at<br />
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business and professional levels as well as in family and personal life. (Katz & Aakhus, 2002, p.2) Mobile communications are more and more an important channel for the promotion of social connections. According to Kopomaa (2002) personal mobile phones contributed, at an early stage, to the process of individuality in contemporary societies. However, mobile phones are also responsible for a new trend that connects mobile users to a wider network. People, particularly young people, attained a new kind of interaction through the use of text messaging (Kopomaa, 2002). Contacts with other people entail the risk of losing one’s individuality, because human interaction is characterized by a tendency towards conformity. While the mobile phone can be used to avoid physical contact, users perhaps inadvertently come to accept the demand for uniformity inherent in following the shared rhythm and schedules of their telecompanions. The mobile phone can be the centre of an ’unsocial’ social life. To cope with this social features are being considered in the development of new mobile services. It is a place one frequents regularly as well as a ’decentralized meeting place’. (Kopomaa, 2002, p.243) According to Castells, Fernández-Ardèvol, Linchuan Qui and Sey (2009) we live in a mobile society network with a new logic of interaction. This new logic is characterized by ubiquitous connectivity and perpetual contact – anywhere and anytime – mobile communication affects the logistics of daily life and the coordination of daily interactions – the micro-coordination is affected by mobile communication. The mobile telephone has changed the way we think of interacting. The vignettes here show how the ability to call directly to an individual affects the way we organize activities and the way that we socialize. In addition, the device allows us to interlace the remote and the co-present. In this<br />
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way we can assert – or at least try to assert – a type of control over different situations. We can coordinate interaction and we can deal with various forms of emergencies, both large and small. In addition, the device itself has become a type of icon for our times. It is a way for us to show our status and to tell others who we are. Finally, the device affects the way that we integrate the intimate sphere. (Ling & Donner, 2009, p.91) The daily life is not the same with or without mobile communication. One can question if it is the ability of micro-level coordination (Silva, 2005) that justifies the exponential growth of mobile communications. People use mobile devices to communicate and coordinate with their social network. Nomadic and ubiquitous communication technologies allow individuals to create and manage networks of relationships without spatial and temporal constraints. However, in this techno-social scenario it’s important to question if this wireless environment is conducive to the expansion of relational networks or, conversely, the tendency is to reinforce the existence of “islands of communication” where it becomes even harder to enter? Besides the challenge of managing social network through wireless devices, people have also to do multiple tasks while managing the communication processes – multitasking – and people can harness spare time – for instance, while waiting on a shopping queue, walking or driving, taking advantage of coordination with social networking to achieve goals of a diverse nature, such as related with family, work, or leisure. In this scenario, we are witnessing a pandemic change - mobile communication transforms the nature and quality of social behaviour and organization – theses changes are pandemic – pancountries, pan-generations, pan-professions. The public space and the dynamics of private relationships are changing with mobile communications, and geolocation provides additional complexity to this scenario.<br />
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The mobile communication and ritual of interaction are complex areas of study that raise several questions, namely, the sense of safety and security, the ability to micro-coordinate, the disturbance of the public sphere, the way teens and parents experience the emancipation process (Ling, 2008, p.3). But also, privacy issues, surveillance, social isolation and loss of face-to-face interaction skills are topics that should be considered in the analysis. Concerning the privacy issues, Schreiner refers that:<br />
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Currently, the challenge is to develop services, and to promote mediated interaction, that provides the possibility to create social networks and the ability to enhance face-to-face communication, generating opportunities of compulsion to proximity. The CONNECTOR system promotes mobile communication and, at the same time, provides information about geographical position to promote contact – from perpetual mobile contact to face-to-face communication.<br />
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if developers of youth-oriented buddy-tracking systems have their way, however, the younger generation will view access to their location information not as a matter of privacy, but rather an asset to their social lives. (Schreiner, 2007)<br />
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RELATED WORK<br />
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Mobile communication in everyday life poses new challenges and new choices (Ling & Donner, 2009) - There is a need to study the phenomenon to understand its social impact on the acceleration of social metabolism and design and testing new services based on the idea of generating social proximity and face-to-face communication, as a way of strengthening social cohesion. Using mobile geolocation data for the analysis of patterns of coordination, urban mobility and social integration the study of territories, coordination and communication (Diminescu, Licoppe, Smoreda, and Ziemlicki, 2006) becomes relevant along with the study of moral conflicts concerning mobile communication, e.g., M-etiquette (what types of uses are suitable in public places? what are inappropriate uses of mobile cameras in the public space?); M-parenting (what kind of surveillance (parents to children) is valid through the mobile device?); Panopticon Mobile (Mobile Communication promotes geolocation omnipresent control?); M-Close Communication (it promotes egocentric networks? The mobile communication promotes the social erosion and “Balkanization”?) - What kind of society is the culture of mobility promoting?<br />
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An analysis carried at the beginning of the CONNECTOR project allowed the identification, at a national and international level, of the mobile services available or under development. These developments, centered on the promotion of geolocated social networks, were analyzed based on the existent commercial offer and among research projects in the area. As a result of this task several services were identified, oriented towards touristic applications, geolocation of users and other purposes related with the promotion of cultural and natural areas. Considering the similarity with the goals of CONNECTOR, the Loopt (http://www.loopt.com/) and Gypsii (http://www.gypsii.com/) were identified as the most relevant applications (Schreiner, 2007, Karimi, Zimmerman, Ozcelik, & Roongpiboonsopit, 2009). An extract of the analysis made can be seen in Table 1. The analysis undertaken confirmed this research topic as one of the most active as far as the development of mobile based applications was concerned. This reinforced the decision to develop an application aiming at the creation of mobile social networks and, in particular, the search for ways to promote face-to-face interaction between users fostered by previous technological mediated interactions. During the development phase of CONNECTOR and after its conclusion several other appli-<br />
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Table 1. An excerpt of a checklist of the features available on applications similar to CONNECTOR (July 2007) Features/Characteristics<br />
<br />
Loopt (USA)<br />
<br />
GyPsii (USA)<br />
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Development framework<br />
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.NET<br />
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N/A<br />
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Web support<br />
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Geolocation<br />
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Sharing of geolocated MM content<br />
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Instant Messaging communication<br />
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Tracking & tracing<br />
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Map paths share<br />
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POIS<br />
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Proximity alerts<br />
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Other features<br />
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Updates on activity by users<br />
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Event notification and sharing<br />
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Ability to receive advertisement<br />
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n/a<br />
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Tips on the closest route to follow<br />
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<br />
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History on past paths by the user<br />
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cations have been released for the major mobile platforms and operating systems: iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry or even Yahoo OneConnect. Some of the most relevant applications released are briefly presented in Table 2. This list does not intend to be a complete one as it presents only some of the applications that share goals with the CONNECTOR system. Attention was given to the features provided by those applications, but main focus was on the evidences of the uses carried by mobile adopters.<br />
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THE CONNECTOR SYSTEM The CONNECTOR system was developed by a joint research group that included researchers from the Department of Communication and Art - Cetac. Media of the University of Aveiro and from the ICT innovation centre InovaRia (through the associated company EasyClick). The project started<br />
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in the first half of 2007 and was concluded one year later. It comprised three main development phases: i) technical and functional specification; ii) development and implementation; iii) evaluation.<br />
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Goals and Target Audience The aim of CONNECTOR is to: • <br />
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• • • <br />
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Promote the creation of geolocated social networks driven by physical proximity and common interests between users; Enable synchronous and asynchronous communication between users; Enable searching and sharing multimedia geolocated content; Provide a platform customizable to different usage scenarios, such as conferences, cultural events, sightseeing tours and trade fairs;<br />
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Table 2. CONNECTOR related applications in the field of social networking Application<br />
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Features<br />
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Loopt Mix (http://www.looptmix.com/)<br />
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The evolution of Loopt with improved features including information where friends are located and what they are doing. Users can share location updates, geo-tagged photos and comments with their buddies or in online social networks, communities and blogs.<br />
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iPhone, Android, Symbian, Blackberry, …<br />
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Wertago (http://www.wertago.com/)<br />
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A mobile application for nightlifers. Allows access to information about venues, to share content, to keep track of friends and chat with them.<br />
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iPhone, Android, Symbian…<br />
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BrightKite (http://brightkite.com/)<br />
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Allows tracking friends’ location, sharing media, and allows integration with the most popular social networks (facebook, twitter...).<br />
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FriendLocator (http://www.friend-locator.eu/)<br />
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A simple application allowing to map facebook friends and check their status.<br />
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MOVIAL Communicator (http://www.movial.com/movial)<br />
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A suite of mobile applications that enable the development of presence (with buddies list), the ability to share media, instant conferencing and music sharing for different platforms.<br />
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• <br />
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Support both indoor and outdoor geolocation.<br />
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The functional structure of the application was designed for two target audiences: • <br />
<br />
• <br />
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The primary audience includes regular participants of temporary events, such as fares, workshops, expos or academic conferences, enabling participants to keep track of other participants’ interests and event’s activities. In these scenarios a parallel usage for touristic purposes is also foreseen, namely for an assistive exploration of the event places; Another target audience consists of people with interests in on-line social networks’ related activities: sharing content, namely User Generated Content; finding peers with common interests or competences; or communicating with them.<br />
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However, and due to the financial and temporal constraints of the project, despite the multiple usage scenarios identified, the evaluation was fore-<br />
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OS<br />
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iPhone, Android, Blackberry iPhone Symbian,, Windows Mobile<br />
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seen in an academic context, due to the proximity of this context to the research team.<br />
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System’s Model and Architecture As seen in Figure 1 the CONNECTOR system is anchored in two main parts: the location and the communication layers. Regarding the location layer, a central component for supporting users and content related information, the system proposes a solution for both indoor and outdoor usages. In the outdoor scenario, a regular GPS client if available in the mobile terminal provides the coordinates. For indoor support the adopted solution is based on Bluetooth© dumb devices (BDD) carefully placed inside the covered buildings with each position stored in a central database. The mobile device is tracked based on the following procedure: i) A BDD, the one in a closer range, is identified on the terminal; ii) the BDD ID is sent by the terminal to the central database; iii) a matching routine attributes to the mobile terminal the position of the BDD tracked. The resolution of the location data is dependent on the tradeoff between the number of BDDs, its power, physical distribution<br />
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Figure 1. CONNECTOR’s system architecture<br />
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and layout of the building. This solution allows the system to use simple low-priced Bluetooth devices as their only role is to provide a Bluetooth signal for detection. At the communication layer, the synchronization between the mobile client application and the CONNECTOR server may rely on whatever data connection a mobile device has available at the time (3G, GPRS, Wi-Fi). The server side application integrates a Jabber Communication (Instant Messaging) server and a web server supported by MySQL databases. The system is based in two client applications (mobile and web site) that work in parallel and in a complementary way. The mobile client application was developed in Java MIDP 2.0 with support for JSR 179 (for location purposes), JSR 75 (for accessing to the mobile terminal files) and JSR 82 (for Bluetooth connection) API. It is compatible with the mobile phones that support Java (J2ME) and the referred<br />
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specifications. It requires download and installation as an application in each mobile terminal. Along with the mobile client application the CONNECTOR system provides a web site supporting users with a wide set of features that include: registering process; content sharing support; administrative features (management of users and profiles, creation and definition of events and access to usage statistics).<br />
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Functional Aspects Figure 2 shows the main menu and three of the five main areas provided by the mobile client application.. A regular map area (Figure 2(b)) allowing to track: buddies and other CONNECTOR users’ position; geolocated multimedia content (UG photos, videos, sounds, comments); and the map paths shared by users (e.g. a sightseeing walk around the town).<br />
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CONNECTOR<br />
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Figure 2. Mobile client application interfaces: a) main menu; b) map area; c) contacts area; d) events area<br />
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The search area enables interest-based search of other users, and search for multimedia content and map paths shared by others. In the contacts area (Figure 2(c)) users may manage a list of buddies, track their on-line status and map their position, and initiate Instant Messaging conversations. A personal area enables the configuration of system settings and user profile. Finally, CONNECTOR provides an additional area customized for supporting public events (Figure 2(d)). This area relies on the web based back office (further described below) that is managed by the administrator of an event adopting the CONNECTOR system. Using this back office the administrator may define which CONNECTOR<br />
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users may have access to this area in their client application or set an official event timetable (e.g. in an academic event, it may include the agenda, profiles of speakers, keynotes and other related documentation). In the mobile application, along with the access to the official event timetable, users may create a personalized timetable based on their interests, to track information concerning event attendants and to suggest to the community new parallel event activities (e.g. propose a meeting with attendants in a specific field of work related with the event). Figure 3 presents an example of typical usage of CONNECTOR in an academic event such as a scientific congress.<br />
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Figure 3. Example of interaction scenarios using CONNECTOR in an academic event<br />
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The CONNECTOR web site (http://connector. web.ua.pt) provides two mains areas: front office and back office. The front office (Figure 4(a)) is targeted to provide general access to users, to grant information on the project and support the registration of new users. A set of promotional demos and registering forms are provided. The back office (Figure 4(b)) is structured in three sub-areas: Personal area, Event Management and System Management. The set of features available in each area depend on the different users profiles available. The Personal sub-area provides users with most of the features available in the mobile client application: edition of their public and personal profile, search for users and multimedia content, manage and track of buddies in the map and share geolocated content (as seen in Figure 4(b)). The Event Management sub-area, as described before, allows event administrators to define the settings for each event that adopts CONNECTOR. All the events list and calendar is also made public in the front office. The System Management sub-area provides administrators with the ability to approve new events, manage content abuses, manage users and track the systems’ statistics.<br />
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PRELIMINARY EVALUATION RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS The current version of the prototype has been influenced by the results of the evaluation activities already performed with earlier versions. These experimental evaluation activities included functionality and usability laboratory tests and real usage scenario tests. The functionality and usability laboratory tests focused on the collection of preliminary data concerning the functionality and usability of the maps module, which complexity and sensitivity deserved special attention. Ten beta-testers, with a high technological literacy profile, were invited to use this module and to complete a set of predefined tasks, such as: i) enter the maps area; ii) identify the icon of a particular user from other on-line users; iii) navigate between map users; iv) and access those users’ information. Data was collected through a “thinking aloud protocol”, allowing users to verbalize all thoughts, doubts and comments during interaction. An observation checklist was produced to assure a rigorous data registration. The main conclusions of these tests lead to several relevant improvements both on functional and technical topics, mainly related to navigation and visual representation issues.<br />
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Figure 4. CONNECTOR Web portal: a) The front office; b) The back office<br />
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CONNECTOR was, afterwards, tested in a real usage scenario, in order to enable further enhancements resulting from direct experience with real users. The chosen scenario, corresponding to one of the target markets envisaged for CONNECTOR, large temporary public events, was an international scientific conference1 held at the campus of the University of Aveiro. This event was elected because of the convenience of its location but also due to the expected characteristics of the participants: low technological literacy and little experience in mobile applications’ usage. These adverse but challenging characteristics were considered appropriate to test CONNECTOR features such as usability, compatibility and accessibility. All the tests were developed in situ, within a scenario that was set up according to the following steps: 1. All the conference attendants were previously invited by e-mail to participate in the field trial and to pre-register in an on-line application deployed for this purpose; 2. Registered participants were invited to fill a personal characterization questionnaire; 3. Based on criteria such as the declared level of digital literacy and the declared intention of intensity of usage, and according to the available number of mobile terminals, five participants were selected to take part on the trial, enabling the creation of a convenience sample; 4. A mobile phone with the CONNECTOR application was provided to each of these five participants on the first day of the conference; 5. A presentation session of the CONNECTOR project and system was held prior to the field tests; 6. Data was collected through a “QuestionAsking Protocol” and through a final informal interview. The data collected during both the “QuestionAsking Protocol” and the final interview was<br />
<br />
mainly related to: degree of use; number of interactions; influence of previous relations; new established relationships: type of interactions maintained; degree of satisfaction; functionality evaluation; degree of utility; and predisposition to future usage. The main results of these tests provided evidence about: a) Interface validation: interaction typologies were evaluated as efficient; b) Task efficacy: the main tasks were completed as requested; c) Adaptation to usage context: the utility in conference scenarios was confirmed; d) Influence of the technological literacy profile: participants with low technological literacy and little experience in mobile application’s usage revealed severe difficulties; e) General users’ satisfaction: the majority of participants declared their future interest in using a similar application; Despite the relevance of these evaluation activities, additional in-depth field trials aiming the provision of further evidences are required in order to strength the design and implementation options adopted in CONNECTOR. Beyond usability, compatibility and accessibility issues, the potential of CONNECTOR on the creation and promotion of social networks also deserves special attention. On this line, it seems very interesting to study, with the help of a social network analysis software (e.g. Pajek (http://pajek.imfm.si/doku. php) or Unicet (http://www.analytictech.com/ ucinet/)), issues such as: a) number of connections established (with or without previous social contact); b) context of the established connections (considering participants characteristics, the tasks performed and the spatial scenario in which it occurred);<br />
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c) nature of the interactions that the connections established promoted; d) impact in the promotion of face-to-face contacts. The experience of designing CONNECTOR enabled a deeper understanding of the constraints and challenges about developing mobile social applications and reinforced the importance of content personalization and of context oriented services (e.g. using geolocation of people to define the content offer). Current developments in mobile applications (e.g. Ccast ICT project2) enable many diverse context information scenarios, such as environmental conditions or social and behavior circumstances, which can be used to influence the type of information or features presented to the user. Furthermore, the analysis of communication networks requires the adoption of a multitheoretical framework. Theories based on the relevance of issues such as self-interest or collective action (Granovetter, 1978) may be very useful to understand the emergence and co-evolution of human networks supported by geolocated mobile social systems and services like CONNECTOR.<br />
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Castells, M., Fernández-Ardèvol, M., Linchuan Qui, J., & Sey, A. (2009). Comunicação Móvel e Sociedade. Uma Perspectiva Global. Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Diminescu, D., Licoppe, C., Smoreda, Z., & Ziemlicki, C. (2006) Using mobile phone geolocation data for the ‘socio-geographical’ analysis of patterns of coordination, urban mobilities and social integration’, Proceedings of the International Specialists Meeting on ICT, Everyday Life and Urban Change, Bergen, The Netherlands, 9-12 November. Giddens, A.(2004). Sociologia. 4ª ed., Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (tr. Sociology. (2001). Polity Press with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.). Granovetter, M. (1978). Threshold models of diffusion and collective behavior. The Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 9, 165–179. doi:10.108 0/0022250X.1983.9989941<br />
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REFERENCES<br />
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Karimi, H. A., Zimmerman, B., Ozcelik, A., & Roongpiboonsopit, D. (2009). SoNavNet: a framework for social navigation networks. Proceedings of the 2009 international Workshop on Location Based Social Networks (Seattle, Washington, November 03 - 03, 2009). LBSN ‘09. ACM, New York, NY, 81-87.<br />
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Boden, D., & Molotch, H. (1994). The compulsion to proximity. In R. Friedland and D. Boden (eds). Nowhere. Space, time and modernity, 257-286. Berkeley: University of California Press.<br />
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Katz, J. E., & Aakhus, M. (2002). Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511489471<br />
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Boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210–230. doi:10.1111/j.10836101.2007.00393.x<br />
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Kopomaa, T. (2002). Mobile Phones, Placecentred Communication and Neo-community. Planning Theory & Practice, 1470-000X, 3(2), 241–245.<br />
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Castells, M. (1997). The Rise of The Network Society. The Information Age. Economy, Society and Culture (Vol. I). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.<br />
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Ling, R. (2008). New Tech, New Ties – How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion. Cambridge: The MIT Press.<br />
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Ling, R., & Donner, J. (2009). Mobile Communication. Cambridge: Polity Press. Schreiner, K. (2007). Where We At? Mobile Phones Bring GPS to the Masses. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, (May/June): 6–11. doi:10.1109/MCG.2007.73 Silva, L. O. (2005). Os arquipélagos de comunicação potenciados pelo uso dos telemóveis e pelas tecnologias móveis. Livro de Actas – 4º SOPCOM. Universidade de Aveiro, 2005, 1963–1973. Thompson, J. (1995). The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wellman, B. (2000). Changing Connectivity: A Future History of Y2.03K. Sociological Research Online, 4(4). doi:10.5153/sro.400 Wellman, B., & Hampton, K. (1999). Living Networked in a Wired World. Contemporary Sociology, 28(6). Wellman, B. & Hampton, K. (1999). Living Networked On and Offline. Contemporary Sociology 28, 6, Nov, 648-54.<br />
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Mobile: electronic device that provides ubiquitous access to communication and information services. Geolocation: technology that provides information on the geographical position of people or content. Social Network: a set of actors connected by significant social relationships. Presence: awareness information usually used in social networks and applications related with user’s status, position or activity. Computer Mediated Communication: textual, voice or video interaction between two or more people using electronic devices and networks. Context: the conditions and background surrounding a person, an event, or an object/content. Sharing: the act of giving access to others or to the public to a certain resource, object or content.<br />
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ENDNOTES 1<br />
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29th Annual Conference of the Portuguese Association of Anglo-American Studies, April 17-19, 2008. http://www.ict-ccast.eu/<br />
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Chapter 28<br />
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Providing VoIP and IPTV Services in WLANs Miguel Edo Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Alejandro Canovas Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Miguel Garcia Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain Jaime Lloret Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain<br />
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ABSTRACT Nowadays, triple-play services are offered in both wireless and wired networks. The network convergence and the new services such as VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) are a reality. However, the future of these networks will have a different concept, breaking the current limits beyond the computers even the current mobile devices, any device may have access to any service at anytime from anywhere. In order to understand this new dimension, the ubiquity concept must be clear: an electronic device has to be able to be always connected to the network. The solutions must be based on the structures and current environments to carry out those challenges in a correct way. In order to reach this ubiquity, the science community has to take into account that its implementation should not assume a high cost to the user and that the system must comply with the quality of service measurements to satisfy the user. In this chapter, first we will show the main VoIP (Voice IP) and IPTV (IP Television) transmission protocols and the compression formats most used as also the bandwidth needed. Our goal is provide ubiquity into multimedia scenarios in WLANs. We will carry out tests to guarantee the appropriate values in some network parameters such jitter, delay, number of lost packets and enough effective bandwidth that should be satisfied. We will show the measurements taken from several test benches. They show the parameter values that the devices should perform in order to stay connected from anywhere at any time to these services. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch028 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.<br />
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Providing VoIP and IPTV Services in WLANs<br />
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INTRODUCTION In telecommunications’ world, Triple Play (Hellberg, Greene and Boyes, 2007) is a marketing concept that could be defined as the service integration and audiovisual contents (voice, high speed data and television). Triple Play includes voice services with broadband access, adding also audiovisual services like TV channels and pay per view (PPV). The Triple Play service offers all the services in the same network independent of the kind of access technology: coaxial, optical fiber, unshielded twisted pair (UTP), Power LAN Communications (PLC) or radio (for example, through microwave). All the services are provided using the IP technology. The bundling of voice and television services over IP (VoIP and IPTV) plus the broadband data services in the residential markets is now a priority in the strategy of the service providers in the entire world. From several years ago, wireless networks have been achieving great popularity because the deployment of these networks are low cost while provide quite mobility, ubiquity and scalability (Tang, Man-Fung and Kwong, 2001). When they appeared, users only transmitted best effort information. But, now, WLANs are used for many kind of traffic such as: data traffic, multimedia traffic, telephony traffic, etc. These networks have evolved quickly to meet the needs of the users: more security and bandwidth. It is therefore evolved from IEEE 802.11b, which is used to supply a theoretical bandwidth of 11Mbps, to IEEE 802.11a and IEEE 802.11g, which provides a theoretical bandwidth of 54Mbps. Moreover, IEEE 802.11n standard provides a theoretical bandwidth of 600Mbps using MIMO (a technology which uses multiple antennas to coherently resolve more information than possible using a single antenna). This technology is always in progress. Nowadays the WLANs became key<br />
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offering advantages such as ubiquity, flexibility while providing high bandwidth. The main objective of this chapter is to evaluate the Voice service over the Internet Protocol (VoIP) and the TV service over the Internet Protocol (IPTV) in Wireless Local Area Networks in order to guaranty ubiquity to this type of services. Moreover, we will see that the final user will have connectivity everywhere if they have this parameter values. The user will not lose the service; therefore our network will be providing a continuous grade of ubiquity. First, we will analyze the performance of VoIP services and their protocols by showing the measurements taken of their delay, jitter, bandwidth, the number lost packets, etc (Edo, Garcia, Turro, and Lloret, 2009). Any VoIP device must have guaranteed an appropriate quality of service. VoIP devices, such as the smart phones, are capable of connecting to the wireless network and make free VoIP calls between devices in the same IP network. This feature is very interesting in companies and institutions that have a big wireless local area network and employers moving inside the intranet with their mobile devices. Nowadays, PBXs based on free software provide the same functionality as a traditional PBX. In wireless network architectures, the quality of a call has to be ensured by taking network measurements and analyzing network parameters during the call. Finally, we will analyze IPTV service under ubiquity situations in dual-band environments. First, we will analyze the minimum bandwidth required in the wireless access network to provide IPTV services showing also the measurements taken of their delay, jitter, and the number lost packets. This work will show which range of measurements should follow any administrator in its wireless local area network in order to provide mobility and ubiquity to IPTV and VoIP devices while maintaining enough quality of experience to the final user.<br />
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RELATED WORK In the literature, we can find several publications dealing with IP telephony over wireless networks. When we talk about IP telephony and WLAN, first we need to know whether it is possible the use of IP telephony on IEEE 802.11 b/g wireless networks. In such papers there are theoretical studies on the feasibility of IP telephony over WLAN Hole and Tobagi, 2004), (Cai, Xiao, Shen and Mark, 2006) and also, in some of them, the quality of calls using different audio codecs G.711 and G.729 (Hole and Tobagi, 2004) is checked. In other papers, the behavior of IP telephony over WLAN, when these wireless networks have another kind of traffic, is analyzed (A. Dutta, P. Agrawal, S. Das, et al., 2004). There are many works where the authors talk about wireless IP telephony as a system that improves the communications between users (Hassan, Nayandoro and Atiquzzaman, 2000). The IP telephony and VoIP are very close concepts, in many of the papers studied, the authors write about VoIP, but the voice transmission mechanism used is IP telephony. In (Henderson, Kotz, and Abyzov, 2004), the authors presented a study about data traffic in a wireless network of 550 access points and 7000 users. In this paper we can see the increase of VoIP traffic on WLAN in the last years. The authors have also studied the mobility of the users and noted that the user is not always placed in fixed position. In addition, they did a study about the amount of corporative network ingoing and outgoing VoIP traffic, average length of calls, total VoIP traffic, etc. These communication systems operate properly via Internet when there is a control of users connecting to the network. One way to perform this task is the admission control. Reference (Szabó, 2003) presents an admission control system of IP calls to obtain an adequate QoS. These systems must keep always the user connected. When the system discards a user in the admission control when the user is trying to connect to an access point (AP), it must be reassigned to another AP.<br />
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In (De Sousa, De O. De S. Chaves, Cardoso and Cavalcanti, 2006), the authors present a study of the access selection problem in a multi-access wireless network. They propose an access selection solution, in which the arriving users as well as a few ingoing users are reassigned according to the new systems’ conditions. This solution selects candidate users to a vertical handover and anticipates the user context transfer. The way of supporting user mobility in IEEE 802.11 networks can have a strong effect on certain types of services. Roaming is the main cause for heavy packet loss error in wireless networks. As far as we know, the IEEE 802.11b standard for WLANs allows handover between overlapping WLAN cells at the link layer. Since this only permits connection to one WLAN at a time, it falls into the category of hard handovers. During the handover, clients cannot send or receive data and packets queued at the old WLAN because they will be lost. This type of handover is unsuitable for the multimedia traffic. The roaming management produces temporary periods of high packet loss that affect bandwidth estimations and these underestimations reduce service performance during longer periods of time than those caused by the usual roaming process. For real-time video streaming, roaming directly affects the quality of video reception and impacts the user satisfaction. To date, most MAC protocols for wireless networks do not provide a reliable multicast service. For reliably multicasting packet over WLAN, it will be necessary to modify the MAC layer protocol to add recovery mechanism. Adding local recovery at the MAC layer can greatly improve the performance for multicast in wireless networks. Next-generation WLAN standard probably supports the more reliable multicast/broadcast scheme (Ma, Feng, Liu and Tang, 2005). In the last years, we have found an intense research activity on the effects of WLAN over streaming services. There are multiple possible solutions to decrease the roaming effects in streaming services, ranging from modifications on current streaming service<br />
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devices (clients and servers) to the design of new intermediate devices to avoid modifying the service devices. Here we present some outstanding solutions to improve the quality of such services, especially in roaming situations. The first option we can think of is the use of Mobile IP (Perkins, 1996), which allows a Mobile Node (MN) to receive IP packets through a packet forwarding procedure, but handovers in Mobile IP are slow and packets can be lost during the handover procedure, making it unsuitable for the handover of video traffic. In (Bruneo, Villari, Zaia and Puliafito, 2003), an advanced agent-based architecture to provide guaranteed quality to the Mobile users in a WLAN is presented for a VoD (Video on Demand) Service. In it, the Access Points manage the user’s mobility (handoff) and implement the management policies of the QoS (reservation, allocation and distribution of the bandwidth). The service architecture is based on intermediate elements (virtual servers) and client software modifications. In (Cunningham, Perry and Murphy, 2004), a vertical soft handover scheme is presented, using jitter as the indicator for initiating the handover process. A method combining the benefits of multiple descriptions coding (MDC) and multipath routing is explained in (C-M. Chen, Y-C. Chen and Lin, 2005) to improve the quality of streamed video in WLAN roaming situations. It incorporates channel status detection mechanism to decide which channel will be selected or multiple channels will be used to take advantage of path diversity to deliver the streaming video content. Using active probing, they use the loss-rate and round-trip time to determine the channel status. In (Bellavista, Corradi and Foschini, 2005) we can find a proxy-based middleware that foresees client handoff and manages intermediate buffers between client and server to reduce the effects of the handover latency. The proxy manages an intermediate buffer that stores data during roaming to reduce packet loss. In (Vilas, Paneda, Melendi, Garcia and Garcia, 2006), a solution to minimize all the negative effects of a roaming situation in<br />
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a WLAN, based on a buffering scheme and the pro-active management of signaling control messages between clients and server, is proposed. It is based on off-the-shelf Wi-Fi hardware and unmodified commercial streaming clients and servers. A Wireless Proxy (intermediate element), which is aware of the type of access network, is used to manage client to server signaling. The results show that the use of such a transparent intermediate element filtering or forwarding client signaling messages significantly improves streaming service performance over WLANs. The results of the tests also show that maintaining an independent stable channel between server and proxy helps to reduce roaming effects over the interchanged data. Currently, the IPTV concept is a service that is being considered to be offered by many communication operators and researchers in general. Yang Xiao et al. in the paper (Xiao, Du, Zhang, Hub, Guiana, 2007) explain carefully the main characteristics of the IPTV service. In addition, they indicate that IPTV may be a revolution in the market. They also show several applications used by IPTV. In the same paper the authors indicate that it is a big challenge to have a service with an appropriate QoS. In reference (Singh, Kvvon, SeongSoo and Ngo, 2008), the authors introduce wireless technology in the IPTV architecture. In this case, the authors present the IEEE 802.11 technology as the adequate to carry out the IPTV transmission. This work shows the features that should meet the IEEE 802.11 networks and the authors give some ideas to improve the QoS level. Other interesting architecture design for distributing triple play services over a wireless mesh network is shown in (Shihab, Cai, Wan, Gulliver, and Tin, 2008). In (Gidlund and Ekling 2008), authors give an overview of the possible mesh architectures that could be applied in IPTV environments. They developed a model that was simulated to study which architectures were suitable for the QoS levels. The authors discussed and evaluated the possibility of distributing triple<br />
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play services over a wireless meshed network established in an indoor environment. They used IEEE 802.11b/g. As it can be seen in many works, the authors present architectures or new connection systems based mainly on the QoS levels. Moreover, many of IPTV works talk about QoS. For example, reference (Zhang and Liang, 2008) presents a wireless architecture that supports QoS in IPTV. This architecture uses a QoS control mechanism. A QoS-guaranteed IPTV service mechanism was proposed in (Park and Choi, 2007). In order to guarantee the service, they proposed a connection admission control that was controlled according to the remained bandwidth. If the bandwidth is enough to allocate a new flow, a connection will be provided. Once the connection is established, it might be certainly guaranteed, but these policies cannot be applied when there are several traffic classes, which have different levels of QoS. Another work is (Lee, Trong, Lee and Kim 2008), the authors propose a QoS-guaranteed IPTV service provisioning by differentiated traffic handling in home network IEEE 802.11b/g Wireless LAN. The proposed traffic-engineering scheme prioritizes IPTV traffic to provide guaranteed QoS in the inter-mixed and congested traffic condition. Assigning differentiated access category to each packet according to predefined QoS class provides prioritization of traffic.<br />
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VOIP AND IPTV TRANSMISSION PROTOCOLS In this section we will show several common VoIP and IPTV transmission protocols such as IGMP and UDP in the internet layer and RTP and RTCP in the application layer. IP Multicast provides the way to send a single media stream to a group of recipients in a computer network. A multicast protocol, usually IGMP, is used by the hosts to announce their interest in receiving a multicast group to the edge routers.<br />
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These edge routers use multicast routing protocols, to form multicast spanning trees through the network. One of the challenges in deploying IP multicast is that routers and firewalls between networks must allow to forward packets destined to the multicast groups. It is very important to use network equipment with IGMP snooping support. This function intercepts multicast traffic intelligently to avoid the multicast flow where it is not necessary. It is performed reading IGMP report and IGMP join messages between the multicast routers and network PCs. It is necessary to prevent a WLAN cell to get more multicast groups than the required ones. Datagram protocols, such as the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) (Postel et al., 1990), send the media stream as a series of small packets. UDP is a transport layer protocol oriented to send messages, in this case referred to as datagrams, to other hosts on an Internet Protocol (IP) network. Voice and video traffic is generally transmitted using UDP. Real-time video and audio streaming protocols are designed to handle occasional lost packets, so only slight degradation in quality occurs rather than large delays if lost packets are retransmitted. This is simple and efficient; however, there is no mechanism within the protocol to guarantee delivery. It is up to the receiving application to detect loss or corruption and recover data using error correction techniques. If data is lost, the stream may suffer a dropout. The Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) provides end-to-end network transport functions suitable for applications transmitting real-time data, such as audio, video or simulation data, over multicast network services. It was developed by the Audio-Video Transport Working Group of the IETF and first published in 1996 as RFC 1889, and superseded by RFC 3550 (Schulzrinne, et al., 2003) in 2003. RTP is used extensively in communication and entertainment systems that involve streaming media, such as triple play. RTP does not address resource reservation and does not guarantee quality-of-service for real-time services. RTP is usually used in conjunction with the RTP<br />
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Control Protocol (RTCP). While RTP carries the media streams or out-of-band signaling (DTMF), RTCP (Friedman, et al., 2003) is used to monitor transmission statistics and quality of service (QoS) information. When both protocols are used in conjunction, RTP is usually originated and received on even port numbers, whereas RTCP uses the next higher odd port number. RTP and RTCP are built on top of UDP. As we can see in Figure 1 we have a point to point communication using the described protocols.<br />
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VOIP AND IPTV FORMATS In this section we will show several VoIP and IPTV formats and compression algorithms. Moreover, we will show the SIP Protocol and the G.711, G.723.1 and G.729 audio codec that are used in voice over IP. Furthermore, we will show the main features of 720p and 1080p HDTV formats and MPEG (Le Gall, 1991) compression and transport streams, including the needed bandwidth to stream IPTV without compression and with compression.<br />
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Session Initiation Protocol and Audio Codecs The SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) (Rosenberg, et. al. 2002) is a protocol for controlling and sig-<br />
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naling systems used primarily in IP Telephony. It was developed by the IETF (RFC 3261). The protocol allows to start, to modify and to finalize multimedia sessions with one or more participants and its greatest advantage lies in its both simplicity and consistency. SIP makes use of elements, called proxy servers, to help route requests to the user’s current location, authenticate and authorize users for services, implement provider call-routing policies, and provide features to users. SIP can also invite participants to already initiated sessions. Media can be added to (and removed from) an existing session. SIP is a peer to peer TCP/IPbased Application Layer protocol. It is designed to be independent of the underlying transport layer but it can run on top of several different transport protocols and can be used with other IETF protocols to build complete multimedia architecture. Typically, these architectures include protocols such as the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) (RFC 1889) for transporting real-time data and providing QoS feedback. SIP support five facets of establishing and terminating multimedia communications: user location (determination of the end system to be used for communication), user availability (determination of the willingness of the called party to engage in communications), user capabilities (determination of the media and media parameters to be used), session setup (ringing, establishment of session parameters<br />
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Figure 1. Point to point communication using VoIP and IPTV transmission protocols<br />
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at both called and calling party) and session management (including transfer and termination of sessions, modifying session parameters, and invoking services). Voice traffic is generated by packetizing the output of a voice encoder (the most used audio codec are G.711, G723.1 and G.729); which creates packets each containing a fixed amount of voice data. These packets are transmitted over the network using RTP over UDP/IP (see Figure 2). The G.711 audio codec or Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) of voice frequencies is an ITU-T standard for audio compounding and it was released for their usage in 1972. G.711 is a very commonly used waveform codec, it uses a sampling rate of 8,000 samples per second and has a non-uniform quantization (logarithmic) with 8 bits used to represent each sample, resulting in a 64 Kbit/s bit rate. The G.711 defines two main compression algorithms, the µ-law algorithm (used in North America & Japan) and A-law algorithm (used in Europe and the rest of the world). G.711 μ-law tends to give more resolution to higher range signals while G.711 A-law provides more quantization levels at lower signal levels. On the other hand, G.723.1 and G.729 audio codecs need a license for their use. The G.723 (ITU-T Recommendation G.723, 1988) audio<br />
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Figure 2 Multimedia streaming protocols<br />
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codecs are mostly used in Voice over IP applications due to its low bandwidth requirement. It is a codec that compresses voice in 37.5 ms frames with a transmitting bit rate of 6.3 Kbit/s (using 24 byte frames with a MPC-MLQ algorithm) or a bit rate of 5.3 Kbit/s (using 20 byte frames and ACELP algorithm). The G.729 (ITU-T Recommendation G.729, 1996) is an audio data compression algorithm for voice that compresses digital voice in packets of 10 milliseconds duration. It is officially described as Coding of speech at 8 Kbit/s using conjugate-structure algebraic-codeexcited linear predictions (CS-ACELP).<br />
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IPTV FORMATS AND MPEG COMPRESSION AND TRANSPORT STREAMS Nowadays, there are two main formats in digital television SDTV (Standard-definition television) and HDTV (High-definition television). The main format in SDTV is 720×480 (in NTSC) or 720×576 (in PAL) both of them for DVD quality (see figure 3). In HDTV there are two main formats: 720p and 1080p. The compression can be performed with several video compression algorithms, but in this text we will only show the main features of<br />
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MPEG. This is because MPEG is the most used transport stream compression. On the one hand, we can stream 720p HDTV and it will provide a video format of 1280x720 (a vertical resolution of 720 pixels and a horizontal resolution of 1280 pixels), with a native resolution in XGA of 1024x768 pixels and 1280x720 or 1366x768 pixels in WXGA, with an aspect ratio of 16:9 (widescreen aspect ratio). On the other hand we can stream 1080p HDTV or Full-HD with a vertical resolution of 1080 pixels and a horizontal resolution of 1920 pixels (Blue-ray quality) with an aspect ratio of 16:9 (widescreen aspect ratio).<br />
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Needed Bandwidth to Stream IPTV In order to stream 720p and 1080p HDTV without compression, we will need a higher bandwidth. A standard definition DVD movie file size is approximately 3 GB/hour (50MB/s), an uncompressed 1280×720 (HDTV 720p) movie file size is over 150 GB/hour (2.5 GB/s) and an uncompressed 1920×1080 (HDTV 1080p or Full-HD) movie file size is over 350 GB/hour (5.833GB/s).This is the matter of the video streaming compressing in MPEG transport stream (MPEG-TS). In MPEG transport stream, the most used compression algorithms is MPEG-2 (Barry G. Atul, Arun and<br />
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Netravali, 1997). MPEG-2 or H.262 is a video codec standard that nowadays is used in digital television broadcasting, Cable, DBS, DVD video. MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 (Richardson, 2003) is a next generation video codec standard jointly developed by ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG. In Table 1 we show an MPEG-TS comparative encoding SDTV, 720p and 1080p HDTV. As we can see, the bitrates decrease using the MPEG-4 AVC/H.264codec. MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 has more than the double of the potential in compression efficiency over MPEG-2 video. Although MPEG4/H.264 needs more CPU effort than MPEG-2, this is due to the algorithm complexity. MPEG-2 and MPEG-4/H.264 are compression algorithms that belong to the MPEG compression algorithm family, but these algorithms need a transport stream. The transport stream that these algorithms use is MPEG-TS. It is a communications protocol for audio, video, and data. It is a type of digital container format that encapsulates packetized elementary streams and other data. Its design goal is to allow multiplexing of digital video and audio and to synchronize the output. Transport stream offers features for error correction for transportation over unreliable media, and it is used in broadcast applications such as DVB and ATSC. In addition, there are other transport<br />
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Figure 3. Digital television formats<br />
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Table 1. Compression comparative Format Without compression<br />
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SDTV 50MB/s<br />
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HDTV 1280x720p (16:9) 2.5 GB/s<br />
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HDTV 1920x1080p (16:9) 5.833GB/s<br />
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MPEG-2<br />
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MPEG-4AVC /H.264<br />
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streams and compression algorithms. Nowadays Windows Media Video (WMV) is rivaling with MPEG. WMV is a compressed video file format developed by Microsoft. The last release of WMV is WMV9/VC1. It provides a compression ratio that is two times better than MPEG-4 (not MPEG4/H.264), and three times better than MPEG-2. WMV9 use RTSP (Schulzrinne, et. al. 1998) (TCP/UDP port 554) to transport the streams, but it could be transported by MPEG-TS. In our work we decide to use MPEG because it is open, and nowadays it is the most used transport stream protocol and compression algorithm.<br />
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PROVIDED UBIQUITY IN MULTIMEDIA SCENARIOS Provided Ubiquity in VoIP Scenarios, Real Measurements and Test Bench VoIP (Voice service over the Internet Protocol) was firstly deployed for the wired network. However the evolution of the wireless networks provided by the latest IEEE 802.11 standards allows the deployment of VoIP on the wireless network. One of the main advantages of the IP telephony over a wireless network is that it allows mobility of the people while they are talking. The goal of this section is test the behavior of a wireless network to provide ubiquity in VoIP scenarios. In order to show the performance of our proposal, we will show the measurements carried out in our experiment to evaluate the network performance in a ubiquity scenario. The devices used in our test bench were Cisco Aironet access point 1100<br />
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series and Cisco Catalyst 2950T-24 switches with 100BaseT links. We took the measurements in a closed environment without the interference of external devices in order to avoid variations due to external factors. We used Asterisk (Asterisk), an Open source PBX, in order to register the IP telephony devices. The IP telephones incorporate the IEEE 802.11g standard and WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) (Wi-Fi Alliance, Wi-Fi Protected Access) encryption with Protected EAP (PEAP) and EAP-MSCHAP v2 authentication, thus ensuring a secure communication. Our system is based on the network architecture shown in Figure 4. The phones support the SIP protocol, which is used to connect with the Asterisk PBX. In order to perform our study, we have captured RTP packets on UDP/IP using the Network Analyzer Wireshark (Wireshark Network Protocol Analyzer). We used G.711 as the audio codec. This codec gives us the best voice quality as it does not use any compression. It is the same codec used by the ISDN networks (Integrated Service Digital Network) and the sound quality is like a conventional telephone. It also has the lowest latency since there is no need for compression, which leads to less processing load. The number of IP telephony devices and the test procedure is described later in this section. This system is designed to be executed even when a conversation is running. This situation is the most critical, for this reason the following measures are made when there are several conversations running. It allowed us to evaluate the network performance of a ubiquity scenario. In order to analyze the performance and quality of calls we made 9 calls of 30 second each one<br />
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Figure 4. IP Telephony network architecture<br />
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in the same Access Point, testing the delay, jitter, packet loss and bandwidth. Then, we made 2 calls of 360 seconds each one, testing the delay, jitter, packet loss in a roaming scenario. These two measurements have been done in order to compare the system behavior when there is roaming and when there is not.<br />
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Delay, Jitter and Packet Loss Test in 30 Seconds Call In this subsection we will show the delay, jitter and packet loss tests carried out in our experiments. In the Figure 5a shows the data obtained in the delay measurements in the 30 seconds call test. It only shows 5 out of 9 calls because we want the graph to be understandable. As we can see, none<br />
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Figure 5. Measures of the delay call and jitter<br />
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of the 5 calls exceed 50ms delay. In Figure 5b we see the highest average delay and delay per call. Visually we can see that the average delay time is around 20ms. Performing the overall average of 9 calls we obtain a delay of 19.68 ms and the average maximum delay is 39.01 ms. In Figure 5c, we can see the results of the Jitter tests. In neither of the cases, the jitter exceeds 6ms and it is maintained almost constant all the time around 1 ms. In Figure 5d, the average of the jitter and maximum jitter per call is shown. In the graph, we see that the jitter does not exceed 6 ms in none of the 9 calls, giving an average of 1.11 ms jitter and 3.92 ms of maximum jitter. In Figure 6a, we can see the results of the tests carried out concerning the lost packets. In calls 1 and 2, we can see how the number of lost packets grows rapidly around 14 seconds after the call have started because the IP phone buffer is filled up. Nevertheless, under no circumstances is this packet loss appreciable during the communication. In the following figures (Figure 6b and Figure 6c) we can see that the packet loss in the calls is very high. The packet loss average is 162.22 (a 12.39% of packet lost). Although it may seem a very high rate, this does not affect the conversa-<br />
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tion. The 9 calls have had an excellent quality. The transmitted packets average is 1329.77 for all the 30-second calls.<br />
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Delay, Jitter and Packet Loss Test in Roaming Calls In the roaming test, we did the same procedure as in the 30 seconds call test but in this case we have made two calls. One of the phones is static in an Access Point and the other is moving around the wireless network. The data displayed on the following points are those obtained from the phone that is moving. Figure 7a shows the data obtained of the delay measures when we tested the roaming. We can that the delay is around 20 ms, as it happens in Figure 5a, but in this case, because the information has to go through many more network equipment, it ranges between 25 ms and 15 ms with an average of 19.78 ms. In this test, the maximum average delay is 49.92 ms, whereas it was 39.01 ms in the 30-second calls between the two phones using the same Access Point. In Figure 7b, we can see the data obtained in the analysis of the jitter in the roaming test. As shown in the figure, jitter<br />
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Figure 6. Transmitted packets, lost packets and percentage of lost packets per call test<br />
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values are between 0.5 and 1.5 ms (very similar to tests carried out in the 30 seconds call test), but the maximum jitter average of 3.92 ms has increased to 6.03 ms. The average jitter has not increased. In Figure 7c, we can see the lost packets obtained in the analysis of roaming calls. As in previous points, the values obtained are similar to the 30-second calls. In this case we have a lost packet average per call of 8.00% without causing any problem. The maximum packet loss is caused when the buffer is full in the IP phones. In Figure 7d we show the effective bandwidth in the wireless network. These tests show us that there is a capacity of around 20000 Kbps with an average of 18514.31 Kbps in the IEEE 802.11g wireless network. In the next subsection we will see the bandwidth occupied by IP phones and then we will use the obtained effective bandwidth (Figure 7d) to calculate the amount of IP phones that theoretically might work in this wireless network.<br />
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Bandwidth Testing At this point we are going to see the occupied bandwidth both by the set of the 9 of 30-second calls and by the roaming calls, using in both tests<br />
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the audio codec G.711 and then we will calculate the amount of IP phones that theoretically might work in this wireless network. In Figure 8a, we can see how the calls 1 and 5 have a drop of bandwidth; this is due to packet loss because the buffer of the IP phone in both cases is full. Moreover, in the moments where there is no loss of packets we can see that the bandwidth is around 80 and 110 Kbps with an average of 89 Kbps. In Figure 8b, we can see that the average bandwidth per call is always between 100 and 120Kbps (concretely 110.04 Kbps). This is very important because it allows us to calculate the theoretical number of phones that can operate on our wireless network. In Figure 8c, the bandwidth has a mean value of 90.16 Kbps (it is very similar to the 89 Kbps in the 30 second’s average calls). The maximum bandwidth average varies significantly. It rises from 110.04 Kbps up to 128 Kbps. This is very important in order to calculate the maximum number of phones. According to the paragraph above the effective bandwidth in the IEEE 802.11g network is 18514.31 Kbps. The maximum bandwidth, generated by our phones when they were in a position to roaming (worst situation), was 128Kbps. Following these<br />
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Figure 7. Delay and jitter test in roaming calls and the effective bandwidth in the IEEE 802.11g network<br />
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Figure 8. Bandwidth measurements<br />
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steps we can say that the theoretical number of phones that our wireless network support per access point is approximately 144. In conclusion, we can say that the IEEE 802.11g wireless network could, theoretically, support up to 144 IP phones per access point using the audio G.711 codec. This number would be obtained in an ideal situation where we had always this effective bandwidth with a small amount of ex-<br />
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ternal interference always in a network devoted solely to IP telephony without any other type of traffic. On the one hand, we have checked that the average of the data obtained in both cases in discussion (the set of 9 30-second calls and the roaming calls) are very similar. This can be seen in Table 2. By contrast, in Table 3 we can see that the maximum increases markedly in the roaming calls. This is due to the mobility of the user who<br />
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Table 2. Mean value of the data obtained in the tests aforementioned 30s Call<br />
<br />
Roaming Call<br />
<br />
Delay<br />
<br />
19.67ms<br />
<br />
19.78ms<br />
<br />
Jitter<br />
<br />
1.41ms<br />
<br />
1.06ms<br />
<br />
IP BW<br />
<br />
89Kbps<br />
<br />
90.15Kbps<br />
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Lost Packet %<br />
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12.39%<br />
<br />
8.00%<br />
<br />
Table 3. Average of the maximum values 30s Call<br />
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Roaming Call<br />
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Delay<br />
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39.01ms<br />
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49.92ms<br />
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Jitter<br />
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3.92ms<br />
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6.03ms<br />
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IP BW<br />
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110.04Kbps<br />
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128Kbps<br />
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Figure 9. IPTV multicast network deployment<br />
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makes a reassociation between different access points constantly. Another important aspect in this type of integrated services is the number of users using that service in the wireless network. That is, the number of user that can be connected at the same time to the network with their mobile devices. This problem could be solved through a system that redistributes the IP telephony devices over the Access Points (AP), when the system detects an overloaded AP. This system was proposed by the same authors of this chapter in (Garcia, Bri, Turró and Lloret, 2008). The system collects information from the various IP telephony devices and associates the IP phones to the closest APs that is less overloaded. The system balances the bandwidth consumption over the APs through relocating the VoIP devices. In this work we also discuss the roaming delay within a network and between different networks to provide ubiquity, and best audio codec to consume less network bandwidth.<br />
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Provided Ubiquity in IPTV Scenarios, Real Measurements and Test Bench The aim of this section is show that IPTV services can provide ubiquity and mobility using the IEEE 802.11 wireless technologies. Therefore we will test dual-band IPTV architecture to provide streaming multimedia. In order to test the network performance when using IPTV service and analyze which features offers, we used the following wireless devices: • • • • <br />
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A multipoint to point IEEE WLAN 802.11a/g (Lobometrics 924N) A Linksys WAP54G Access-Point for IEEE WLAN 802.11g An Intel Pro Wireless 3945 ABG wireless card. 120 degrees directional antennas with 16 dB of gain to increase the coverage.<br />
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The video source is an IPTV Server. The program used to stream HDTV 1080p multicast video was the VLC Media Player (VLC, 2009)<br />
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and the streaming profile was MPEG-TS video encapsulation. The packets captured for further study were RTP packets on UDP/IP using the network protocol analyzer Wireshark. In order to provide ubiquity in IPTV, we propose a system where several wireless technologies coexist and the customers have dual IEEE802.11a and IEEE802.11g (or tri-band devices, if we use also IEEE 802.11n) that decides which type of wireless access network to connect on the requirements of the IPTV client, the available networks, and some network parameters (see Figure 9). The network parameters area used to take the appropriate decisions in order to change the wireless network to be connected with. These parameters are the number of loss packets, the jitter and packet delay. This system allows an IPTV device to roam without decreasing the quality of service of the user, and provides ubiquity to the devices. All these networks allow connections with higher bandwidth than 1372.85 Kbps.<br />
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Delay, Jitter, Packet Lost and Bandwidth Test In order to analyze the performance and quality of the IPTV content distribution system we streamed multicast HDTV 1080p video. Then we tested the delay, jitter, packet loss and bandwidth. The packets were captured by the laptop that was using an IPTV client. Figure 10a shows the data obtained for the delay test. It only shows 30 samples per sec., during 90 seconds of video, in order to have enough values for the graph. As we can see, the 2 delay tests have around 2700 samples. IEEE 802.11a technology had 14.39 msec. of maximum delay, but it was a peak. It had an average delay of 2.02 msec. In the IEEE 802.11g delay test we obtained an average delay of 2.07 msec. and a maximum delay of 10.90 msec. We can see that all wireless technologies used give us an average delay around 2 msec. In this way we fulfill the requirements of 50 msec. viewed in reference (Rahrer, Fiandra<br />
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and Wright, 2006). Figure 10b shows the results of the jitter tests. The jitter is maintained almost constant all the time and lower than 1 msec., although there is a peak of 14.09 msec. in the 802.11a technology. There was an average jitter of 0.76 msec. and a maximum delay of 1.35 msec. in the IEEE 802.11g jitter test. We obtained an average jitter of 0.52 msec. in IEEE 802.11a. We can see that the jitter was 35% better in IEEE 802.11a than IEEE802.11g. It could be caused by several reasons. First, because IEEE 802.11g seems to be less stable than the other ones, and, second, because there were devices working in the 2.4 GHz frequency band close to us (the university wireless LAN network). Figure 10c shows the measurements taken from lost packets tests. The IEEE 802.11g network had an average of 5 lost packets (0.19% of packet lost). Finally, the worst case was IEEE 802.11a. In this case we obtained 9 lost packets (0.33%). There were 2700 transmitted packets for all the scenarios. It seems that the IEEE 802.11a technology was less robust than the other ones. Figure 10d shows the test of the effective bandwidth for all technologies in a real environment. These tests show that, empirically, a maximum of 2501.77 Kbps in the IEEE 802.11g and around a maximum of 1372.85 Kbps in the IEEE 802.11a. The bandwidth consumed by the streamed video has an average value of 924.42 Kbps. This will be very important when we calculate the theoretical number IPTV channels that can be streamed in our proposed IPTV content distribution system. Following these steps, the theoretical number of IPTV channels that our proposal IPTV content distribution system can support is 2 IPTV channels in the IEEE 802.11g scenario with a HDTV 1080p quality of video. With IEEE 802.11a we only transmitted one HDTV channel. In order to provide ubiquity in this type of service networks, the roaming is an important aspect that should be analyzed. This problem can be solved using the user location. In (Canovas, Boronat, Turro and Lloret, 2009), we made a study<br />
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Figure 10. Delay, jitter, lost packets and effective bandwidth measurements in the streamed video test<br />
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of a system where the received signal strength (RSS) of an AP is sent to a control server (called roaming controller) trough SNMP messages. Then, when the mobile device goes close to the new AP, the roaming-controller will activate a new group multicast. This system reduces the roaming times and increases the quality of service.<br />
<br />
CONCLUSION In this chapter we have tested wireless networks providing ubiquity into VoIP and IPTV scenarios. To obtain these results, on the one hand, we have shown how an IEEE 802.11g wireless network could provide ubiquity for VoIP services. This is due to the obtained results in the 30s call test and in the roaming test. We have got a favorable average of delay, jitter, bandwidth and lost packets that support our proposal. As we can see, the IEEE 802.11g can support roaming without any problem to the final user being the result of the roaming test very similar to the obtained test in the 30s call test that was in a single access point.<br />
<br />
We have calculated the theoretical number of VoIP phones that an IEEE802.11g Wireless LAN can support using the G.711 codec being able to improve these results using G.723.1 and G.729 audio codecs. This number would be obtained in an ideal situation where we had always this effective bandwidth with a small amount of external interference always in a network devoted solely to IP telephony without any other type of traffic. On the other hand, we tested a dual-band IPTV architecture to provide streaming multimedia using both wireless networks (IEEE802.11a and IEEE802.11g) testing the jitter, delay and packet lost being able to improve these results using a tri-band devices, if we use also IEEE 802.11n. It proves that IPTV services could be provided ubiquity by these wireless technologies. We calculated the amount of HDTV channels that can be streamed in an IPTV content distribution system. The measurements taken from VoIP and IPTV services show that they offer great number of possibilities. A user will be sure that he will see the IPTV if his device has the appropriate values in the wireless network. IP telephony and<br />
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VoIP applications such as Skype can be used in the wireless network with free mobility and a user can be watching a film from the Internet with any wireless device while he moves from one place to another in a ubiquity environment.<br />
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REFERENCES Asterisk (n.d.). Asterisk. Retrieved from www. asterisk.org Bellavista, P., Corradi, A., & Foschini, L. (n.d.). Application- level Middleware to Proactively Manage Handoff in Wireless Internet Multimedia. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Management of Multimedia Networks and Services, MMNS 2005, Barcelona, Spain, October 24-26, 2005 Bruneo, D., Villari, M., Zaia, A., & Puliafito, A. (n.d.). VOD services for mobile wireless devices. In Proc. of the Eighth IEEE international Symposium on Computers and Communications, ISCC03, June 30 - July 03, 2003 Cai, L., Xiao, Y., Shen, X., & Mark, J. W. (2006, April 13). (n.d.). Voice Over IP-Theory and Practice. International Journal of Communication Systems, 19(4), 491–508. doi:10.1002/dac.801<br />
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Dutta, A., Agrawal, P., & Das, S. (2004, May). Realizing mobile wireless Internet telephony and streaming multimedia testbed. Computer Communications, 27(Issue 8), 725–738. doi:10.1016/j. comcom.2003.10.012 Edo, M., & Garcia, M. Turro. C., & Lloret J., IP Telephony development and performance over IEEE 802.11g WLAN, 5th International Conference on Networking and Services, ICNS 2009. Valencia, Spain. April 20-25, 2009 Friedman, et al., RFC 3611, RTCP: Real-time Transport Control Protocol, 2003. Garcia, M., Bri, D., Turró, C., & Lloret, J. A UserBalanced System for IP Telephony in WLAN. 2nd International Conference on Mobile Ubiquitous Computing, Systems, Services and Technologies, UBICOMM 2008. Valencia, Spain. September 29 - October 4, 2008 Gidlund, M., & Ekling, J. (2008). VoIP and IPTV distribution over wireless mesh networks in indoor environment. IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, 54(4), 1665–1671. doi:10.1109/ TCE.2008.4711218 Haskell, B. G., Puri A., & Netravali, A. N. (1997). Digital video: an introduction to MPEG-2, 1997.<br />
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Chen, C.-M., Chen, Y.-C., & Lin, C.-W. (2005). Seamless roaming in wireless networks for video streaming. ISCAS, 2005(4), 3255–3258.<br />
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Hassan, M., Nayandoro, A., & Atiquzzaman, M. (2000). Internet telephony: services, technical challenges, and products. IEEE Communications Magazine, 38(4), 96–103. doi:10.1109/35.833564<br />
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Cunningham, G., Perry, P., & Murphy, L. (2004). Soft, vertical handover of streamed video, Fifth IEE International Conference on 3G Mobile Communication Technologies, 3G 2004, pp. 432-436, 2004<br />
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Hellberg, C., Greene, D., & Boyes, D. (2007). Broadband network architectures: designing and deploying triple-play services. NJ, USA: Prentice Hall PTR Upper Saddle River.<br />
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De Sousa, V. A., & De, O. Neto, R. A., Chaves, F. de S., Cardoso, L. S., Cavalcanti, F. R. P. (2006, September). Access selection with connection reallocation for multi-access networks. International Telecommunications Symposium, pp.615-619, 3-6.<br />
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Henderson, T., Kotz, D., & Abyzov, I. (2004). The changing usage of a mature campus-wide wireless network. 10th Annual international Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, Philadelphia, USA, Sep 26 – Oct 1, 2004<br />
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Hole, D. P., & Tobagi, F. A. (2004, June). Capacity of an IEEE 802.11b wireless LAN supporting VoIP. IEEE International Conference on Communications 2004, 1, pp. 196-201, 20-24, Paris (France) ITU-T. (n.d.). ITU-T Recommendation G.723.1. Retrieved from http://www.itu.int/rec/T-RECG.723/e ITU-T. (n.d.). ITU-T Recommendation G.729. Retrieved from http://www.itu.int/rec/T-RECG.729/e Le Gall, D. (1991). C-Cube Microsystems, San Jose, CA, MPEG: A video compression standard for multimedia applications. Lee, K.-H., Trong, S. T., Lee, B.-G. L., & Kim, Y.-T. (2008). QoS-Guaranteed IPTV Service Provisioning in Home Network with IEEE 802.11e Wireless LAN, IEEE Network Operations and Management Symposium. Pp.71-76. Ma, J., Feng, X., Liu, Y., & Tang, B. (2005). Video multicast over WLAN. IEEE International Symposium on Communications and Information Technology, ISCIT 2005, vol.2, pp. 1400-1403, 12-1. Park, A. H., & Choi, J. K. (2007). QoS guaranteed IPTV service over Wireless Broadband network, The 9th Int. Conference on Advanced Communication Technology, vol. 2, pp. 1077--1080, Feb. 2007 Perkins, C. (1996). IP mobility support, RFC 2002. IETF. Postel, J., et al. (1980). RFC 768, RTCP: User Datagram Protocol. Rahrer, T., Fiandra, R., & Wright, S. (2006). Triple-play Services Quality of Experience (QoE) Requirements and Mechanisms. DSL Forum Working Text. WT-126. Richardson, I. (2003). H.264 and MPEG-4 Video. Compression: Video Coding for Next-Generation, 2003.<br />
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Schulzrinne, (1998). RFC2326: Real Time Streaming Protocol. RTSP. Schulzrinne, et al (2003). RFC 3550, RTP: Realtime Transport Protocol. Shihab, E., Cai, L., Wan, F., Gulliver, T. A., & Tin, N. (2008). Wireless mesh networks for in-home IPTV distribution. IEEE Network, 22(1), 52–57. doi:10.1109/MNET.2008.4435903 Singh, H., Kvvon, C. Y., Kim, S. S., & Ngo, C. IPTV over WirelessLAN: Promises and Challenges, 5th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, Pp.626-631, January 2008 Szabó, I. (2003). On call admission control for IP telephony in best effort networks. Computer Communications, 26(4), 304–313. doi:10.1016/ S0140-3664(02)00150-0 Tang, K., Man-Fung, K., & Kwong, S. (2001, April). Wireless Communication Network in IC Design Factory. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, 48(2), 452–459. doi:10.1109/41.915425 Vilas, M., Paneda, X. G., Melendi, D., Garcia, R., & Garcia, V. G. Signalling (2006). Management to Reduce Roaming Effects over Streaming Services. In Proc. of the 32nd EUROMICRO Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications. EUROMICRO, pp. 398-405. VLC Media player. (n.d.). VLC Media player. Retrieved from http://www.videolan.org Wi-Fi Alliance. (n.d.). Wi-Fi Alliance. Retrieved at http://www.wi-fi.org/ Wi-Fi Protected Access. (n.d.). Wi-Fi Protected Access. At http://www.wi-fi.org/knowledge_center/wpa2 Wireshark Network Protocol Analyzer. (n.d.). Wireshark Network Protocol Analyzer. Available at www.wireshark.org<br />
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Xiao, Y., Du, X., Zhang, J., Hub, F., & Guiana, S. (2007, November). Internet Protocol Television (IPTV): The Killer Application for the Next-Generation Internet. IEEE Communications Magazine, 45(11), 126–134. doi:10.1109/ MCOM.2007.4378332 Zhang, J.-Y., & Liang, M.-G. (n.d.). IPTV QoS Implement Mechanism in WLAN, Int. Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing. pp.117-120, 15-17 Aug. 2008<br />
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS VoIP: Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a general term for a family of transmission technologies for delivery of voice communications over IP networks such as the Internet or other packet-switched networks. IPTV: Internet Protocol television (IPTV) is a system through which digital television service is delivered using the architecture and networking methods of the Internet Protocol Suite over a packet-switched network infrastructure. IEEE 802.11: IEEE 802.11 is a set of standards carrying out wireless local area network (WLAN) computer communication in the 2.4, 3.6 and 5 GHz frequency bands RTP: The Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) defines a standardized packet format for delivering audio and video over the Internet. RTP<br />
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is designed for end-to-end, real-time, transfer of multimedia data. IGMP: The Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) is a communications protocol used to manage the membership of Internet Protocol multicast groups. IGMP is used by IP hosts and adjacent multicast routers to establish multicast group memberships. UDP: The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is one of the core members of the Internet Protocol Suite, the set of network protocols used for the Internet. With UDP, computer applications can send messages, in this case referred to as datagrams, to other hosts on an Internet Protocol (IP) network without requiring prior communications to set up special transmission channels or data paths. HDTV: High-definition television or HDTV refers to video having resolution substantially higher than traditional television systems (standard-definition TV, or SDTV). HD has one or two million pixels per frame, roughly five times that of SDTV MPEG: The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) was formed by the ISO to set standards for audio and video compression and transmission. SIP: The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling protocol, widely used for controlling multimedia communication sessions such as voice and video calls over Internet Protocol (IP). The protocol can be used for creating, modifying and terminating two-party (unicast) or multiparty (multicast) sessions consisting of one or several media streams<br />
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Chapter 29<br />
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SIe-Health, e-Health Information System Juan Carlos González Moreno University of Vigo, Spain Loxo Lueiro Astray University of Vigo, Spain Rubén Romero González University of Vigo, Spain Cesar Parguiñas Portas University of Vigo, Spain Castor Sánchez Chao University of Vigo, Spain<br />
<br />
ABSTRACT In recent years, the incessant development of new communication technologies has provided a better way for accessing information and also a lot of useful opportunities. The implementation of these new technologies gives us an ideal environment for transmitting and receiving real-time information from anywhere. One of the sectors that have a great potential to use and exploit this kind of technologies is the healthcare sector. Nowadays, the application of all these new technologies to support the clinical procedures has taken part in the definition of a new concept known as e-Health. This concept involves a lot of different services related with the medicine/health terms and the information technologies. However, to provide emergency transportation with better care capabilities to the patient is something that still has a lot to improve. Within this context SIe-Health comes into being a software platform oriented for developing Telemedicine solutions. The solution model proposed here allows remote assistance for a mobile health emergency (for example, an ambulance), integrating in this service electro-medical devices and videoconference services. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch029 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.<br />
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INTRODUCTION The peak of communication between mobile devices and the potential that they have for their integration in a distributed software platform, makes possible the development of new solutions, more dynamic than before, and also more useful in this information society. The implementation of these new systems in every sector of our society, especially in public utilities, could be viewed as a revolution in the way the users can use the different services. This statement is easily verifiable, just consider the increase in the number of simple actions (recharge a phone card, control of television programming, news, real-time access, or shopping, ...) that are fully integrated into modern distributed software systems which have been widely adopted by the vast majority of users, giving them the impression that are able to do anything anywhere. One of the sectors with greater potential to use and exploit these technologies is the health sector. Healthcare involves a large number of different services whose integration into the modern devices offered by new communication technologies is highly dependent on context. The care for dependents through services such as tele care and remote assistance, centralized control of the patient in hospitals, or the current telemedicine systems used by the Army, which are being implemented for civilian use, are just the beginning. Specifically, the implementation of these new technologies to support clinical practice has given birth to a new concept known as e-Health. This term includes a wide range of different services related to medicine / health terms and information technology: • <br />
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Electronic Medical Records (EMR): allow easy communication of patient data between different healthcare professionals (GPs, specialists, care team, pharmacy). Unfortunately as stated in Marion (2006) “fewer than 10 percent of the state’s physi-<br />
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cians and 25 percent of its hospitals have functioning EMRs” (p. 78). Personal and Electronic Health Records (PHR and EHR): Considering the information appearing in Connecting for Health (2006), the Markle Foundation defines the PHR as “an electronic application through which individuals can access, manage and share, their health information in a secure and confidential environment. It allows people to access and coordinate their lifelong health information and make appropriate parts of it available to those who need it”. Thus, it differs from the EHR, which is “an electronic version of the patient medical record kept by physicians and hospitals”. The data in the EHR are controlled by and intended for use by medical providers. Telemedicine: Using the definition appearing in the Wikipedia. “Telemedicine is a rapidly developing application of clinical medicine where medical information is transferred through the phone or the Internet and sometimes other networks for the purpose of consulting, and sometimes remote medical procedures or examinations”. Telemedicine generally refers to the use of communications and information technologies for the delivery of clinical care. It could include all types of physical and psychological measurements that do not require a patient going to a specialist. When this service works, patients need to travel less to see a specialist or conversely the specialist has a larger attention range. Evidence Based Medicine: Using again the Wikipedia: “Evidence-based medicine (EBM) aims to apply the best available evidence gained from the scientific method to medical decision making. It seeks to assess the quality of evidence of the risks and benefits of treatments (including lack of treatment)”. Moreover, EBM involves a<br />
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system that provides information of a suitable treatment under certain patient conditions. A healthcare professional can look up whether his/her diagnosis is in line with scientific research. The advantage here is that the data can be kept up to date. Consumer Health Informatics (or citizen-oriented information provision): both healthy individuals and patients want to be informed on medical topics. Health knowledge management (or specialist-oriented information provision): e.g. an overview of latest medical journals, best practice guidelines or epidemiological tracking. Virtual healthcare teams: they consist of healthcare professionals who collaborate and share information on patients through digital equipment (for transmural care). Health or m-Health: includes the use of mobile devices in collecting aggregate and patient level health data, providing healthcare information to practitioners, researchers, and patients, real-time monitoring of patient vitals, and direct care provision (via mobile telemedicine). Medical research uses eHealth Grids that provide powerful computing and data management capabilities to handle large amounts of heterogeneous data. Healthcare Information Systems: also often refer to software solutions for appointment scheduling, patient data management, work schedule management and other administrative tasks surrounding health. Whether these tasks are part of eHealth depends on the chosen definition, they do, however, interface with most eHealth implementations due to the complex relationship between administration and healthcare at Health Care Providers.<br />
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The work presented in this paper arose from the observation of members of various sectors of<br />
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health. The main objective is to provide emergency transports with an increased healthcare capacity over the patient to increase the quality of service and the possible action over that patient. This requirement generally is specified in the lack of information and training of staff involved in service. Keep in mind that most of them have no medical training (are no doctor, neither nurse). This problem appears when a simple patient transfer, becomes a vital urgency. Consider for example the following possible real situation: While transferring a patient who suffers an unspecified ailment and whose state, at first, is not a vital urgency. According to the protocol operation of most of the emergency health centers these services are attended by an ambulance without medical staff, that is with no Doctors. In the event of a sudden worsening of the patient state, it is very important that the patient receives immediate attention by a Doctor. In this case we find a clear shortcoming of the attention that the patient is receiving from the ambulance staffs that are covering this service. A system like ours provides the ability to transmit the most relevant data on the patient in real time, along with video and audio of care. Thus any medical emergency service of any hospital that was connected to the system, can make an initial diagnosis and advise the ambulance staff on how to proceed. Besides the obvious improvement in the quality of service provided during the emergency, there is another added benefit: The system even allows the emergency department physician who will serve the patient knows the exact status of the patient before, during and at the time of admission, moreover they could be the optional medical consultant that tracks and advises the patient during transport. There are currently platforms that are trying to solve certain deficiencies which we have mentioned before. Some, like BioShirt (Michalek, 2006), focuses primarily on capturing clinical data on a continuous basis, moving into the background<br />
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the real-time monitoring of an emergency. There has also been another feature referring to specify the type of patients. This feature is also shared by the system HMES (Loos, 006) of Akogrimo Consortium. Both systems are focusing their attention on a group of patients defined as high-risk with a certain pathology previously diagnosed (heart chronic diseases). Another system, eSana (Savini, 2006), serves for most types of patient; however, it does not contemplate the possibility of using data transmitted in real time to establish an early diagnosis. All these systems are deeper presented in a section. There are a number of international studies like Korpela et al. (2005) that support both the benefits and the possibility of establishment of such architectures. Others like BC eHealth System Concept Architecture (2005) support a macro system for comprehensive integration of any element that generates information relevant to the health of a patient. Software architectures for digital healthcare are another proposal for the overall management. These architectures are focused on the use of an international protocol for the exchange of communication known as HL7. SIe-Health was born to give full solution to the problem in development this project. The creation of a platform which allows solving current shortcomings in care systems of medical emergencies has been marked as its main objective, helping the flow of useful information in real time, among all the subjects involved in the care of urgency. At this point, the system proposed allows doing the following: (i) To obtain from the Coordination Centre, realtime information on all vehicles intended for emergency care. (ii) To connect multiple electromedicine devices to the patient to collect clinical data. (iii) To dispatch of the clinical data in real time from the ambulance toward the Coordination Centre, Hospital and / or CAP.<br />
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(iv) To monitor and track multiple emergencies from the Centre for Coordination at the same time. (v) To support communication through audio, video and data channels, between the ambulance and Coordination Centre, and simultaneously, with any other destination referred to in the architecture.<br />
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TECHNOLOGIES, INFORMATION SOURCES AND STANDARDS USED The use of standards and information technology provides a starting point for the system analysis and his future development. For this reason, this section presents a study of what it is available at the moment and some possible contributions to the development of the system.<br />
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Development Organizations, Standards and HealthCare initiatives IHE13 (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise): IHE Europe: IHE Spain This is a joint initiative of industry and health professionals to improve the communication ways on the health information systems. It promotes the coordinated use of established standards, as HL7, XML and DICOM to solve the specific needs of the patient care and improve their quality. IHE ensures that the specifications must produce systems that communicate with one another more easily and are easier to implement. Also, these systems allow health professionals a more efficient use of the information.<br />
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HL7 (Health Level Seven): HL7 Spain All HL7 standards are used for the electronic exchange of medical information. The Level 7 refers to the existence of a level seven on the OSI layer that provides support services to network applications. HL7 was developed by ANSI and in<br />
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their Version 3 several of the approved standard definitions include the use of the UML modeling language and the XML meta-language. HL7 is the standard that is currently being used in Europe, getting several agreements with CEN, European Standardization Committee. These agreements led to the compatibility of their standards, what enables any system developed under the standard HL7 the ability to communicate with a system developed under the standards of CEN.<br />
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XML The meta-language XML is used extensively on the standardization and data management between computer systems. The use of XML in the clinical research industry and health care is widespread. An e-Health application should be based on an architecture specified using XML, what provides connectivity necessary for high levels of efficiency in the processing information and in the management of a high workload.<br />
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Technologies and Information Sources A Middleware is a software connectivity that offers a set of services to help in the functioning of distributed applications on heterogeneous platforms. This software is used as an abstraction layer to distributed software, between the application layer and lower layers (operating system and network). The Middleware provides an abstraction level for the complexity and heterogeneity that are present on the underlying communications networks, as well as on the operating systems and in the programming languages. Standards as CORBA or RMI provide different Middleware solutions for distributed objects on a same basis. CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is an architecture standard which provides a platform for the development of distributed systems. One of their main goals is to help on the remote method invocation under<br />
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the object-oriented paradigm. It also enables the implementation of services regardless of the programming language in which they are written. This mechanism is a quite relevant abstraction on the e-Health domain for any software engineer, specially taking in mind the range of possible digital health devices that must be connected in a software Health-care system. RMI (Remote Method Invocation Java) is a mechanism provided by the language Java that allows to remotely invoke a method on a distributed object. It is important to remark that the communication interface for distributed applications, are significantly simplified because it is integrated on the RMI Java Runtime Environment. The use of agent technology in the sector of information technology (IT) has been increased in the last years as a consequence of the improvements it brings. This technology combines several other types that have as common goal the fact that they act autonomously to replace the behavior of some entity (a person for example). The application of this technology provides an abstraction of autonomous entities for exchanging information. Finally it is remarkable the role it can play the Java Mutimedia Framework (JMF) on the data streaming management. Especially when combined with any API for processing XML data; JAXB and JAXP allow the management of XML files from a defined pattern or analysis of a fast.<br />
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E-HEALTH SYSTEMS Systems that integrate technologies that serve as mobile platforms for the development of solutions in the social and health environments, represents a significant portion of the software development and innovation for specific health services. These kinds of systems have to take account important issues, many of whom are oriented to a overall improvement of services provided to citizens, allowing more services and actions that technological progress may become outdated.<br />
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In this way, SIe-Health aims to provide an application environment designed initially to improve emergency health care services, under established protocols of most health agencies which actually coordinates this type of service. From a general point of view, over an area of control and coordination of any emergency, the different public administrations usually manage all resources, both human and material, through small territorial delegations, which in turn are coordinated by central coordinating body. In this pyramidal structure is common a delegation of tasks and resource allocation while maintaining some control over them. It represents an apparent inherent decentralization. In the particular case of medical emergency services is very important that the management of available resources and control of tasks are performed, the performance with maximum guarantees. In this way, it must be considered that the emerging mobile technology revolution is an important part in the process of improving these services. The solution presented in this paper starts from a preliminary analysis of the performance of emergency medical transport services. Typically these services are coordinated at regional level by a central emergency telephone exchange available, through which citizens with a health emergency requiring help. This is the trigger that initiates the action of the focal point of public health emergencies, which immediately mobilize the resources available to meet the emergency, within their respective territorial area. Resources, meaning ambulances are limited. Within these limitations, there is also an intrinsic deficiency of the current system, most of the health emergency service ambulances have medical staff, but don’t have medical personnel aboard them. There are a few vehicles that are medicalized ready to cover the priority emergencies, established through the coordination center. Note that in most situations, given the high level of training of personnel working in these services and the proper management and organization of<br />
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resources, it makes possible that the current system work covering current health emergencies as satisfactory way. However, in this work, we propose a further step in order to improve these services through application of current technological possibilities. The current system, as mentioned above, works well. But sometimes while transmitting the state of a patient, changes became unpredictable and then, many complications could appear. In other words, the problem arises when a simple routine patient transfer becomes a vital urgency. An example of that situation could be the following: Moving a patient who suffers from an unspecified ailment and whose condition, in principle, is not serious. According to the protocol operation of most of the focal points of health emergencies the service is attended by ambulances, that are manned by technical personnel without doctor and nurse. In the event of a sudden worsening of the patient, what implies a worsening direct that endanger their life, is really important that patients receive immediately medical attention. Therefore, in this case detected a deficiency of the attention it is receiving the transferred patient (remembering, ambulance without doctor and nurse). Being aware that it is economically unfeasible to maintain a system in which all vehicles have doctors and nurses on health services, 24 hours/day, it is considered that the best solution requires establishing mechanisms to maintain channels of continuous information between emergency units in health services (ambulances), and groups of trained medical personnel (doctors) to coordinate and assist in the development of the performance of these urgent services. And here comes in the growing development of mobile technologies applied to social-health field. In essence, the E-Health aims to provide capabilities to communicate in real time the most relevant data about a patient, in addition to video and audio, to allow make an initial diagnosis by doctors<br />
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and advice ambulance staff about the procedure. Besides the obvious improvement in the quality of the service during the transfer, there is another added benefit: The medical emergency service to attend to the patient, can know exactly the status of the patient before and at the time of arrival to the hospital. Moreover the same doctor who advise about the procedures to the ambulance staff during the transfer, can attend the patient when it arrives. In addition to the welfare and care of the patient coming, this system provides a mechanism for centralized control of all emergency services performed in a given geographical region through their respective focal point. This focal point, the emergency management center, is the one who establishes the video-conference sessions with mobile units for each emergency, then delegating these communications with the medical centers or hospitals, destiny of that emergencies. The practical approach of this system is very broad, and this particular case about health services was taken as a starting point for our development. However, the potential of this system is not confined exclusively to improving emergency health services, but can become established in other areas, such as improved care services like attention to elderly people, and migrate to other areas of social sector health.<br />
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RELATED WORKS Related to the work presented, as pointed in the introduction, it could be found similar projects that make up an initial state of the art. In this section some of these project are analyzed to remark a set of important features that do not have and that the solution proposed in the paper provide in order to improve the general services of healthcare.<br />
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The eSana Framework: Mobile Services in eHealth using SOA Developped by Marco Savini, Andreea Ionas, Andreas Meier, Ciprian Pop, Henrik Stormer on the University of Fribourg, the eSana framework (Savini, 2006) was developed as an integrated system to connect patients with several medical experts. This framework offers application developers a solid base in order to create their applications. The scenario is used to get medical data from mobile patients (e.g. patients with chronic diseases as diabetes) and transmit them directly to a server; this data is afterwards offered in some way to a set of subscribed recipients that can build their own services with it. The data information may be used for different means, but the architecture has not been thought to be used on line in an emergency situation.<br />
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E-Health with Mobile Grids: The Akogrimo Heart Monitoring and Emergency Scenario This system proposed by Christian Loos from the Universität Hohenheim is based on the use of Mobile Grids. These grids form networks of mobile and stationary monitoring and diagnosis facilities around the patient, electronic health records, medical decision support, diagnosis and analysis services, as well as even mobile medical experts and physicians. Thus, Mobile Grids provide an infrastructure for an efficient development, provision and maintenance of complex e-health applications.<br />
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Realization of an e-Health System to Perceive Emergency Situations This work realized by S. C. Shin, C. Y. Ryu, J. H. Kang, S. H. Nam, Y. S. Song, T. G. Lim, J. W. Lee, D. G. Park, S. H. Kim, and Y. T. Kim, presents an e-health system to perceive emergency situations<br />
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of a patient. The system need to use an awearable shirt (BioShirt) and a personal monitoring system (PBM). This system obtains the body signals of a user. A monitoring system collects and transmits the vital signs to a personal digital assistant (PDA) throw BlueTooth communication module. To detect emergency from the received data, a simple detection algorithm is performed in the PDA. And the PDA forwards the data to an e-health central monitoring room (ECMR), if necessary. In the ECMR, several operators supervise the registered users based on incoming body signals from each users device. If an automatic decision-making algorithm generates an emergency alarm, the operators try to contact the corresponding patient and recognize his status. These three projects are designed to work in controlled environments with limited space and with a very specific group of patients. Its capabilities are fully defined in the way of covering specific application cases and for certain diseases. However, our system combines aspects such as decentralization and transfer of data, but for cases and situations much more general. In our project, the main function of the system is to provide the necessary mechanisms to establishing and transmitting video signal, voice and data from electromedical devices on board a vehicle, usually an ambulance, located anywhere in emergencies, and attending to any type of patient.<br />
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SIE-HEALTH ARCHITECTURE The presented platform architecture is divided into three main parts: On Board, Server Area and Monitoring Station. It has been structured this way having in mind practical aspects as the geographic location of each of the applications that shape this system, and other criteria such as workload distributions, available resources and technology constraints. Moreover, the scalability of the systems that shape this type of architecture has been also taken into account. These kind of systems often tend to have a growth both horizontally and vertically. The server duplication leads to the increase in the robustness or to an improved performance. The duplication of clients allows an increase in availability of systems. For these reasons, both clients and thick servers have been developed, as they often tend to be complementary. The next sections present each part of the developed architecture:<br />
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On Board The main function supplied by the architecture of this platform’s part is to obtain information from devices connected to the system and transmit it. Additionally it also gives feedback of what is happening to the central or to the center where these request are treated. Summarizing, their basic objectives are the following ones: • <br />
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Figure 1. Ambulance electro-medical devices<br />
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Getting the data devices connected to the system. Storing the data information obtained. Presenting data through an appropriate user interface. Establishing communication with the server area. Creating a log history for the system in operation<br />
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Server Area The main function of this part is to provide a communication link between any mobile unit and the monitoring station. The information of the emergency is then managed by the provincial’s architecture part of SIe-Health. Taking into account that could exist many monitoring stations, the adoption of this solution by the SIe-Health platform allows to the health professionals in a hospital or emergency department getting, with an admissible delay, the data information that the system obtains on board using their own devices. Moreover this information is also sending to the Coordination Centre for tracking and storage. More in detail, the basic goals for this part of the architecture are the following: • • • • • <br />
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Capturing of data from mobile units. Managing communications between mobile units and the monitoring station. Presenting information about the state of the units associated with a service Storing data and logs. Authentication management.<br />
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Managing local operations when the monitoring station has hands over control the server area.<br />
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Monitoring Station This part of the architecture centralizes the most important control operations of the platform, providing full control over all connections that are served in this system. By the use of this part of the architecture, the coordination Center could attend the incoming emergency call, or could derive it to a Hospital Emergency Department. In this case the basic objectives that must be covering are the following: • • <br />
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Addressing all requests from the platform. Transmitting data information between mobile units and the integrated Action Clients at various points of architecture. Managing and delegating control transmissions on a given server area. Doing a mass storage of data.<br />
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Figure 2. Provincial Architecture Diagram<br />
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Figure 3. Coordination Centre architecture diagram<br />
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SIE-HEALTH SYSTEM DEPLOYMENT In this section it is explained a possible implementation of the architecture. To improve understanding, it presents the operation of the architecture by using prototypes of the graphical user interfaces that could be used in each part of the final system previously introduced.<br />
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Main view – Control Interface Figure 4 shows a possible implementation of the application, which would be installed inside the ambulance. Making a preliminary analysis, based on consultation from experts, it has been stated that the application should support at least the following utilities: • <br />
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Gadget Support for each of the devices connected to the system. This will allow easily add new devices to the application, enhancing its growth potential extensions. The use of plugins designed as Gatgets graph allows the incorporation of new functions to be incorporated later. Support video conferencing duplex. One of the major milestones of the implementation was to support video-conferencing to emergency assistance. Figure used to illustrate the application of “on board” can be seen as part of the interface is dedicated to fill this gap, in a more than acceptable,<br />
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because it could support design for multiconference, allowing different experts can maintain consistent attention to the emergency immediately. Duplex audio support. Provide audio conferencing system is also marked as another milestone for this project. Although the use of voice communication system is common during a transfer. The SIe-Health system aims to go one step further and allow that are taking place several conversations at once, from one device and accompanied by its corresponding image, in real time. Support chat console. Although it may seem like an added without much utility, the chat system allows a conversation simultaneously with different experts, with a minimum computational cost. This has been implemented with the intent to support a possible cover unexpected situation, and not always have a bandwidth wide enough to transmit or receive over a distance. That is why for maintaining high availability of the system is necessary to rely on simple communication systems.<br />
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Once implemented the functionality discussed above, also has set up a support system in case of failure and recovery. The supported system is based on the following points:<br />
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Figure 4. Videoconference window<br />
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Figure 5. Data interface<br />
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System log: The system log will allow the record of all events during an emergency assistance. In a normal situation the system will store data concerning the patient, technicians, doctors, devices and drive history. The implementation of this service will cover any type of event that could happen during service. Support system transmission: During a process of transmitting or receiving data should be checked several factors that can affect this. Thus, we considered different data transmission networks, GPRS, UMTS and 802.11g, and have implemented various protocols of action, depending on number of frames lost. These include the reduction of services offered by the interface for transmission capacity available, or changing from one network to another with less noise. STORAGE data: All data transmitted and received during a service are stored in part for their subsequent study and improve our services. This type of data is that will be useful for support services, while observing their actions during an emergency, may provide a better service by setting new performance protocols. Data from patient monitoring: Real-time data obtained from a patient is shown and transmitted from the vehicle that covers the emergency. Videoconference Window. The architecture design of this part of the system has been stated on González et al. 2009.<br />
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Figure 6. Video-conference interface<br />
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Main View of Interface Monitoring: Monitoring Control Interface This interface will show all the information available about the ambulances under centralized control. The information is presented as a list divided into sectors corresponding to different geographical areas that are managed by the application. Associated with each service offered by the system, SIe-Health store data tables that could be managed underway at any given time. To cover this service the following concepts must be taken into account: • • • • • <br />
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State of flow: indicating the current state of communication with the mobile unit. Status information: indicating the service state, as transfer protocol. Date: indicating the date of commencement of service. Type: indicating the type of unit is performing the service. Destination: indicating the destination of the shipment. In most cases they refers to the hospital destination.<br />
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Figure 7. Main view of interface monitoring<br />
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The protocol for coordination of a service usually comes preset in advance by the existing health system in each autonomous community. For this test case, it has simply been monitored from the central system that the service is carried out properly at all times. As in the system “on board”, it has also remained the registration service and storing data logs concerning any service that is being conducted.<br />
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FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS There are several changes that could be applied to the SIe-Health architecture. Several of the most relevant works to be done are: • <br />
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Monitoring patient’s state through mobile devices: In this line of work, it would try to keep monitoring the patient’s general condition in a controlled environment (hospital complex, geriatric nursing home, etc...) through the transmission of information from different electro-medical devices. Monitoring and advice during surgery: Integrating and implementing a system of video conferencing and data transfer electro-medical devices present in the operating theatre. Module access to patient medical history: The integration into the platform system of digitized medical records is one of the most important works to be done. Integrator for MDP SIe-Health on the platform: MDP (Diagnostic Module Preliminary), which is in its early stage of development. Its aim is to provide an initial diagnosis and guidelines for action in an emergency medical via mobile device isolation.<br />
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CONCLUSION The need for obtaining information from the real world for analysis is increasingly required more quickly. If this is applied to the medicine domain, the speed increases exponentially. This affirmation is evidenced regarding the numbers of devices, which emerge daily and that allow access to such data or information. Regardless of that, it must be taken into account that in many cases getting information and data is difficult due to several obstacles (distance, format...). Moreover, it is also possible that the data could not be analyzed by competent personnel or by appropriate devices. The development of Sie-Health has succeeded in solving these problems and unifying the solution in a single platform. In addition, Sie- Health is an open platform capable of annexing new features that may be sued by the staff who really are the end users of the system. It is also capable of adapting to the needs that are arising from technological advances, improved communications, new devices, etc. One of the biggest problems we found at the beginning of the development of Sie-Health was the need for access to information in a timely manner and with a high degree of integrity. It was added that the barrier of the town, which has led to rule out any means of transferring data from its origin to the location where they will be analyzed, which did not have a high quality during transmission and a wide coverage space ensure a minimum acceptable coverage. That is why we have selected technologies such as GPRS, UMTS, election is not only provides a reliable solution, but it also implies a lower cost and greater ease of development than other discarded options (Satellite, etc). Sie-Health is a platform that facilitates obtaining information from patients in a vehicle intended for emergency health and onward shipment to a plant where they will be analyzed by qualified personnel to provide support during the patient care, staffs that are covering such urgency.<br />
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REFERENCES Ball, M. J., et al. (2006). Banking on Health: Personal Records and Information Exchange. Journal of Healthcare Information Management — Vol.20, No.2 BC eHealth Steering Committee (2005). “BC eHealth Conceptual System Architecture”. British Columbia Ministry of Health Services. National Library of Canada Cataloguing. From: http:// www.healthservices.gov.bc.ca/library/publications/year/2005/BC_eHealthcas.pdf Connecting for Health. (2004, July). Connecting Americans to Their Healthcare. Final Report of the Working Group on Policies for Electronic Information Sharing Between Doctors and Patients. Markle Foundation and Robert Wood Johnson. Korpela, M., Mykkänen, J., Porrasmaa, J., & Sipilä, M. (2005). Software architectures for digital healthcare. HIS R&D Unit, University of Kuopio, Finland. From: http://www.uku.fi/ tike/his/exporthis/CHIMA2005-architecturescorrected160605.doc Loos, C. (2006). E-Health with Mobile Grids: The Akogrimo Heart Monitoring and Emergency Scenario. EU Akogrimo project Whitepaper. Retrieved from: http://www.mobilegrids.org/ Michalek, W. (2006). BIO-SHIRT. Retrieved from http://www.ele.uri.edu/courses/ele382/F06/ WhitneyM_1.pdf Moreno, G., Carlos, J., & Rodríguez, G. Mª, A., González, R.,Astray, R. (2009). V-MAS: a Video conference. Multiagent System. Volume 55, Advances in Soft Computing, (pp. 284-292). New York: Springer-Verlag. Null, R.,& Wei, J. (2009). Value increasing business model for e-hospital. International Journal of Electronic Healthcare 2009 - Vol. 5(1), 48-63<br />
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Riedl, B., Grascher, V., & Neubauer, T. (2002). A Secure e-Health Architecture based on the Appliance of Pseudonymization. Secure Business. Austria, Vienna. From: http://www.academypublisher. com/jsw/vol03/no02/jsw03022332.pdf Savini, M., Ionas, A., Meier, A., Pop, C., & Stormer, H. (2006). The eSana Framework: Mobile Services in eHealth using SOA. In Proceedings of EURO mGOV 2006.<br />
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ADDITIONAL READING Alberto Hernández Abadía de Barbará. “Sistema de Telemedicina de las Fuerzas Armadas Españoles”. Unidad de Telemedicina del Hospital Central de la Defensa. IGESAN. Ministerio de Defensa. From: http://www.csi.map.es/csi/tecnimap/tecnimap_2006/05T_PDF ANSI, American National Standards Institute. From http://www.ansi.org CEN. Comité Europeo Normalización. Disponible: www.cen.org Christian Loos. (2006). “E-Health with Mobile Grids: The Akogrimo Heart Monitoring and Emergency Scenario”. Universität Hohenheim, Information Systems II. From: http://www. akogrimo.org/download/White_Papers_and_ Publications/Akogrimo_eHealth_white_papershort_20060207.pdf CORBA. Common Object Request Broker Architecture. Available at: http://www.corba.org DICOM. Digital Imaging and Comunications in Medicine. From: http://medical.nema.org Garets D., Davis M. (2005, August 26). Electronic Medical Records vs. Electronic Health Records: Yes, There Is a Difference. A HIMSS Analytics White Paper. Chicago, IL: HIMSS Analytics.<br />
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Gunther Eysenbach. (2001). “What is e-Health?”. Journal of Medical Internet Research (J Med Internet Res 2001;3(2):e20). Available at: http:// www.jmir.org/2001/2/e20/ HL7, Health Level Seven Spain. From: http:// www.hl7spain.org Hubert Zimmermann. (1980). OSI Reference Model-The IS0 Model of Architecture for Open Systems Interconnection. From: http://www. comsoc.org/livepubs/50_journals IHE. Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise. From: http://www.ihe-e.org Java Remote Method Invocation, R. M. I. Available at: http://java.sun.com Marco Savini, Andreea Ionas, Andreas Meier, Ciprian Pop, Henrik Stormer. “The eSana Framework: Mobile Services in eHealth using SOA”. University of Fribourg. From: http:// www.mgovernment.org/resurces/euromgvo2006/ PDF/21_Savini.pdf Norman López-Manzanares. (2004). Sevicios Móviles en la Sanidad: Un paso más en la Mejora de la Salud, Telefónica Móviles España. From: http:// www.csi.map.es/csi/tecnimap/tecnimap_2004/ comunicaciones/tema_05/5_007.pdf<br />
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Olga Ferrer-Roca. (2001). Telemedicina. Editorial Panamericana. Pedro Álvarez Díaz. (2007). “Teleasistencia Médica, ¿hacia dónde vamos?”. RevistaeSalud. com Vol 3, Nº 10. From: http://www.revistaesalud.com/index.php/revistaesalud/article/viewArticle/155/411 Shin, S. C., Ryu, C. Y., Kang, J. H., Nam, S. H., Song, Y. S., Lim, T. G., et al. (2004). “Realization of an e-Health System to Perceive Emergency Situations”. Microsystems Research Department, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Deajeon, Korea. From: http://ieeexplore. ieee.org/iel5/9639/30463/01403930.pdf Waegemann, C. Peter (2002). “Status Report 2002: Electronic Health Records”. Medical Record Institute. From: http://www.medrecinst. com/uploadedFiles/MRILibrary/StatusReport.pdf XML. Extensible Mark-up Language. World Wide Web Consortium. From: http://www.w3c.org<br />
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Chapter 30<br />
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Combining Location Tracking and RFID Tagging toward an Improved Research Infrastructure Greg Wilson Virginia Tech, USA Scott McCrickard Virginia Tech, USA<br />
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ABSTRACT The popularity of mobile computing creates new opportunities for information sharing and collaboration through technologies like radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and location awareness technologies. This chapter discusses how these technologies, which provide subtly different information, can be used together toward increased benefit to users. This work introduces technologies for RFID and location awareness, including a survey of projects. We describe advantages of combining these technologies, illustrated through our system, TagIt, that uses these technologies in a traditional research poster environment to provide a rich multimedia experience and encourage ongoing feedback from poster viewers. An overview of TagIt is provided, including user commenting and information sharing capabilities that make use of RFID and location information. User feedback and an expert review highlights how TagIt could benefit authors, information consumers, and the research community, leading to future directions for the research community.<br />
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INTRODUCTION Mobile computing provides opportunities for information sharing and collaboration, but also leads to new challenges regarding knowledge of the current location and the surrounding environ-<br />
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ment. To fully leverage the flexibility afforded by mobility, developers must design their applications with the knowledge that users will not be seated at a desk to use their computers. Instead, they will be on the move, often in unfamiliar locations with artifacts they have not previously encountered. Users want to rely on their technology to assist<br />
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DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch030 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.<br />
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them in understanding their environment and, even more importantly, to be an active participant in it. Two related technologies help to address these issues: radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and location awareness technologies. RFID uses low-cost tags with minimal internal memory and sensing capability that are attached to an object for tracking and information storing purposes. RFID has been widely used in workplace and educational setting to provide low-cost tracking and storage. Location awareness refers to realtime location determination that can be accessed by computing technology. Once a user’s location can be determined, a system can then share necessary information or allow for collaboration. Current location awareness devices include GPS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi. Individually, these technologies help realize the vision of mobile computing--distinguishing it from traditional desktop computing that is tethered to a fixed location. This chapter takes the next step, demonstrating how they can be used together in moving beyond simple tracking tasks to enhance information sharing and improve communication and collaboration. We envision environments where physical objects are tagged, and the users who scan those tags are mobile. Not only is information related to the tag of interest, but so is information related to the current location and prior locations of the objects. The objects could be technology, physical artifacts, or other people. We explore these possibilities in greater depth in this chapter, and we present TagIt, which combines the RFID tagging of professional posters with location awareness that highlights where they have been displayed. This chapter explores how simultaneously using RFID and location awareness can augment common research tasks to create a richer, more collaborative environment. The coming sections give a background on location awareness technologies and on the structure and use of RFID. We also discuss specific areas in which RFID can be useful, including industry and education. We<br />
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then expound upon our vision for combining RFID tags and location awareness technologies, and we introduce our tool, TagIT that uses RFID and location awareness to augment poster environments by encouraging feedback between poster authors and viewers that would otherwise be impossible with a basic poster presentation.<br />
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BACKGROUND Much research has been done with the common goal of making digital inform