Franklin Reynolds

RFID Technology and Applications

Radio frequency identification is a wireless communication technology that lets computers read the identity of inexpensive electronic tags from a distance without requiring a battery in the tags. As RFID technology matures, it will likely unleash a new wave of applications that will exploit inexpensive and highly available automatic identification.

Web 2.0In Your Hand

Web 2.0 presents both a challenge and an opportunity for smart-phone vendors. The combination of HTML and JavaScript is becoming an increasingly powerful application platform. The W3C and some of the most important mobile browser developers, including Apple, Google, Opera, and Nokia, are actively involved in this evolution. Web 2.0 applications have already begun to come to mobile phones. Web widgets based on the WebKit core are already an important part of the iPhone and S60 platforms. Mobile-application developers is drawn to HTML and JavaScript as these new features are added to the various mobile browsers and Web toolkits.

Guest Editors' Introduction: Building a Sensor-Rich World

Sensor networks have historically been relegated to special applications and research projects. Technological advances are making it possible to move from this domain to one in which sensors are pervasive in our world and new applications abound. This article provides an introduction to this special issue on Building a Sensor-Rich World.

Intuitive Service Discovery in RFID-enhanced networks

This paper presents an architecture for easy configuration and intuitive interaction between non-expert users and smart devices. It employs RFID (NFC) object tagging to enable service discovery through simple touch gestures. With this new paradigm, the physical space becomes an extension of the traditional mobile device GUI. In addition, an extensible RFID tag record is described that can be used in a variety of service discovery scenarios. A brief security analysis is included to address potential threats. The proposed approach is further illustrated through a technical realisation based on the UPnP framework. An example use case is selected and the step-by-step process of self-configuration, service discovery and user interaction is described

An O-O communication subsystem for real-time distributed Mach

Our new communication subsystem for Mach has offered us the opportunity to integrate object oriented programming, real time and fault management. Starting with the Mach operating system and an object oriented protocol development toolkit, based on University of Arizonas x-kernel, we have designed and implemented real time and fault isolation capabilities. The flexibility and extensibility of the object oriented toolkit support us in an evolutionary path towards hard real time, fault tolerance and group communication.

Camera Phones: A Snapshot of Research and Applications

Once considered science fiction, mobile phones with digital cameras are now inexpensive, widely available, and very popular. Significantly more camera phones are sold each year than dedicated digital cameras. According to Strategy Analytics, its likely that over one billion camera phones were sold last year. Surprisingly, the tremendous popularity of camera phones has caused little controversy. A few companies and institutions have banned camera phones owing to security concerns, and there has been some abuse of personal privacy, but for the most part, there has been worldwide acceptance of this new technology. Smart phones with smart cameras have clearly enabled new applications. Even better, the widespread availability of these devices makes it possible to bring these new applications to hundreds of millions of users.

Guest Editors' Introduction: Smarter Phones

Mobile phones tend to be very personal devices. Its this property, as much as anything, that makes them so interesting to pervasive computing and offers the potential to enable whole new classes of adaptive, context-aware applications. This special issues articles offer new architectures, tools, and applications that point the way to this exciting future of smarter phones.

A new WWW distributed programming framework

The success of the Internet and the World Wide Web has created an opportunity for a new generation of distributed applications. The developers of these new applications will need new tools to simplify protocol design and development. Once the applications are essentially complete, new portability and security technologies will be needed to overcome the current difficulties of deploying new applications.

Whither Bluetooth

Almost all smart phones sold today include Bluetooth-a short-range, low-power radio technology first introduced in the late 1990s. Bluetooth-enabled accessories for phones-in particular, hands-free headsets-are also quite popular. In the less than 10 years, since version 1.0 of the Bluetooth specification was published, nearly 2 billion Bluetooth products have shipped. Here, we take a look at some of the technology improvements and new applications on the horizon. Whichever approach eventually succeeds, its clear that lower power requirements and higher speeds for Bluetooth are coming. We expect these new technologies will rekindle interest in embedded sensors, scatternets, and the use of IP over Bluetooth-as well as new applications for mobile phones.

Using RFID-based “Touch” for Intuitive User Interaction with Smart Space Security

Home networks and networked consumer electronic devices are increasingly becoming a part of our everyday lives. One of the challenges in designing smart home technology is making these systems secure and, at the same time, easy-to-use for non-expert consumers. We believe that mobile devices equipped with a “touch” network interface and corresponding middleware are ideal for enabling users to intuitively setup and manage the security of their smart homes. In this chapter, we describe such a middleware for mobile phones based on Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. We propose a mobile middleware architecture called iTouchSec based on a higher level User-Interaction with Security (UI-SEC) middleware, called IntuiSec, and a lower level NFC middleware, called iTouch. We present the overall architecture, as well as the detailed design of the necessary NFC records that are exchanged over RF. Finally, we present our experience with an initial implementation of parts of the proposed middleware using actual NFC hardware and Symbian-based mobile phones.