Benjamin Falchuk

MediAlly: A provenance-aware remote health monitoring middleware

This paper presents MediAlly, a middleware for supporting energy-efficient, long-term remote health monitoring. Data is collected using physiological sensors and transported back to the middleware using a smart phone. The key to MediAllys energy efficient operations lies in the adoption of an Activity Triggered Deep Monitoring (ATDM) paradigm, where data collection episodes are triggered only when the subject is determined to possess a specified context. MediAlly supports the on-demand collection of contextual provenance using a novel low-overhead provenance collection sub-system. The behaviour of this sub-system is configured using an application-defined context composition graph. The resulting provenance stream provides valuable insight while interpreting the ‘episodic’ sensor data streams. The paper also describes our prototype implementation of MediAlly using commercially available devices.

Mobile contextual mashup service for IMS

The Web 2.0 paradigm is all about the development of applications and content at the edge of the network by anyone. This ldquowisdom of the crowdrdquo type of activity resulted in a large number of applications being introduced in short time frames utilizing the telecom network as a ldquodumb piperdquo. However, IMS may open up the business opportunities for the cellular operators where they can take advantage of the openness of APIs offered by Web 2.0 dot-coms and still offer the flexible call control features of IMS. Thus, convergence of Web 2.0, mashups and IMS call control features have suddenly become a viable business model that will benefit the end users, cellular operators and application service providers at the same time. Rapid deployment of IMS can certainly be enhanced by successful blending of mashups and built-in features of IMS such as security, authentication, and quality of service. However, there is a lack of existing use case scenarios and experimental validation of supporting various web 2.0 applications over IMS. In this paper, we provide such a framework that helps to blend these two and highlight the lessons learned from the prototyping effort. We believe this framework and analysis of the results obtained from this experiment will be illuminating to cellular operators who plan to deploy IMS infrastructure and offer mash-up type services as well. A new type of service called ldquocontextualrdquo mashup is also described.

Loosely coupled service composition for deployment of next generation service overlay networks

In order to provide various attractive services to users, a user-centric approach such as usergenerated contents and services and a platform which can create a service easily and efficiently have been studied and designed during the past two decades. The IEEE NGSON standard has defined a functional architecture that provides advanced overlay functions for value-added services by collaboration of services with features of context awareness, dynamic adaptation and self-organizing management. Its service composition mechanism is comparable with service oriented architecture. However, due to SOAs complexity, it has not become as popular for user-generated services and contents as so-called mashup technologies, which also provide attractive and simple service creation. In this article we propose the adoption of loosely coupled service composition into the NGSON framework that can easily integrate existing communications and data services with little to no dependence on the underlying implementation and service description language details. Furthermore, the NGSON prototype supporting our proposal is presented as a proof of concept and to verify its advantages for operators, service providers, and end users.

A tool for video content understanding on mobile smartphones

Web-accessible video sites - such as YouTube - currently comprise several of the most trafficked sites in the world. Mobile smartphone penetration is also at an all-time high, as is user-appetite for innovative mobile services. This paper anticipates the desire for video content understanding on mobile smartphones by on-the-go users. The implemented tool provides an innovative, compact, visual way for users to use their smartphone to understand the content of a video of interest before download, and the approach goes beyond the prevalent VCR-like controls and static keyframes of today. With a large e-commerce ecosystem evolving around mobile video, this work is extremely topical. We present our early design and implementation details and show how to support deeper mobile video-understanding than the current limited state of the art.

Server-assisted context-dependent pervasive wellness monitoring

Recent research on remote health monitoring solutions has focused largely on developing context-dependent, streamprocessing capabilities on a personal mobile hub (typically, a cellphone) for energy-efficient transmission of data collected from a set of body-worn medical sensors. In this paper, we argue that commercial deployment of such pervasive wellness monitoring will require the extension of such ‘context dependency’ to the process of data collection (from the sensors to the mobile device) as well. In particular, the utilization of an individuals non-medical activity context, by the cellphone, in coordination with a backend server, is posited to be the key to supporting important objectives such as intermittent sensing and data security/privacy. The server-side platform is able to extract relevant context from a wide variety of personal or generic backend information streams; this context is then enriched by local context derived by the smartphone. We present an early outline of a middleware platform for supporting this objective.

Enabling revenue-generating digital content distribution for telecom carriers

Distribution of digital content is a key revenue opportunity for telecommunications carriers. Currently, as media content moves from analog and physical media distribution to digital on-line distribution, a great opportunity exists for carriers to claim their role in the media value chain and grow revenue by shifting their broadband offer from “all you can eat” high speed Internet access to delivery of a variety of paid content. By offering a distributed peer to peer content delivery capability with authentication, personalization and payment functions, carriers can gain a larger portion of the revenue paid for content both within and beyond their traditional service territories. This paper describes a solution architecture and an approach to digital content distribution that leverages existing Intelligent Network infrastructure that many carriers already possess, as well as Web Services.

Innovative approach for improving access to wireless services in high occupancy vehicles

With the maturation and acceptance of broadband wireless technology and standards (e.g. mobile WiMAX, EVDO, HSPA), forward-looking service providers are beginning to augment their coverage with new broadband wireless networks and offering new higher-speed services. At the same time, we see that on-the-go transit and ride-sharing vehicles are beginning to see a market for offering wireless access throughout a voyage. Such vehicles, however, given their aggregate bandwidth requirements, pose serious load balancing issues for service providers. Providers with multi-network deployments will be in a better position to satisfy such networked high-occupancy vehicles (HOVpsilas) and, through policies, will be able to affect admission control such that the HOVpsilas presence is accounted for. Our solution helps to solve this issue and in this paper we describe the solution components and how they interact. We also describe additional value-adding policies that will further enhance such wireless-to-HOV services.

Impact of services on network capacity: tool for seamless integration of service and network modeling

This demo will present both real and mocked-up usecases of a software application that enables accurate probabilistic modeling of new IP based services and their impact on network resources. The demonstration should be of general interest to Network Service Providers (NSP), device manufacturers, and application developers. Network planning and service analysis is a very important issue for today’s NSP’s; new communications devices and services emerge quickly (e.g., VoIP, Peer-to-peer filesharing, etc.) and end-users demand network resources that are up to the task. For the analyst, our tool leverages familiar UML style views, used to capture prototypical service “sessions”. It then allows annotation of the service model with a rich grammar, model conversion into semi-Markov form, and algorithm execution for network resource usage estimation. Ultimately, analysts gain insight into the impact of new consumer devices and services on their networks.

MetaNet: A Distributed Network Management System for Information Delivery and Planning with Quality of Service Guarantees

MetaNet is a network management system that provides end-to-end communication services with QoS and communication planning support for mission critical applications. It supports immediate and advance resource reservation, and provides information on immediate and future available communication capacity taking into account network configuration and traffic. MetaNet supports these services over multiple heterogeneous networks. The MetaNet consists of a number of PoPs (Point of Presence); each PoP is associated with one or more communication networks. PoPs realize the functionality within their networks and coordinate with each other to realize the end-to-end functionality. Associated with each network is an Adapter that hides from the PoP the network technology specific QoS model and mechanisms.

Content Distribution for Telecom Carriers

Distribution of digital content is a key revenue opportunity for telecommunications carriers. As media content moves from analog and physical media-based distribution to digital on-line distribution, a great opportunity exists for carriers to claim their role in the media value chain and grow revenue by enhancing their broadband “all you can eat” high speed Internet access offer to incorporate delivery of a variety of paid content. By offering a distributed peer to peer content delivery capability with authentication, personalization and payment functions, carriers can gain a larger portion of the revenue paid for content both within and beyond their traditional service domains. This paper describes an approach to digital content distribution that leverages existing Intelligent Network infrastructure that many carriers already possess, as well as Web Services.