Huaigu Wu

An integrated wireless sensing and mobile processing architecture for assisted living and healthcare applications

In this paper we present a wireless solution for monitoring people in need of medical assistance. The application relies on the use of cell phones and inexpensive sensors and is best suited for the elderly and home-bound people. The main functions of the proposed architecture are: (1) Ability to collect signals through a wireless sensor network using protocols like ZigBee and Bluetooth (2) Optimized analysis of data through an adaptive architecture that allows efficient processing of data (3) Real-time alerts and notification. Implementing the above features results in an efficient health-monitoring system, providing an improved medical support for people in their homes and in assisted living environments.

EXEM: Efficient XML data exchange management for mobile applications

In the past decade, the number of mobile devices has increased significantly. These devices are in turn showing more computational capabilities. It is therefore possible to envision a near future where client applications may be deployed on these devices. There are, however, constraints that hinder this deployment, especially the limited communication bandwidth and storage space available. This paper describes the Efficient XML Data Exchange Manager (EXEM) that combines context-dependent lossy and lossless compression mechanisms used to support lightweight exchange of objects in XML format between server and client applications. The lossy compression mechanism reduces the size of XML messages by using known information about the application. The lossless compression mechanism decouples data and metadata (compression dictionary) content. We illustrate the use of EXEM with a prototype implementation of the lossless compression mechanism that shows the optimization of the available resources on the server and the mobile client. These experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the EXEM approach for XML data exchange in the context of mobile application development.

TANGO: A Flexible Mobility-Enabled Architecture for Online and Offline Mobile Enterprise Applications

A mobility-enabled architecture is usually required to facilitate the access of enterprise systems from mobile devices. Typically, mobility enabled architectures are separated in online architectures and offline architectures. The online architectures enable mobile clients to use the online model in which mobile clients access business logic and data located on backend systems using remote invocations. The offline architectures enable mobile clients to use the offline model in which mobile clients access business data locally on devices, and periodically synchronize data with backend systems. The selection of the architecture is based on the needs of the scenarios in accordance with the user requirements. For an enterprise system, there is usually more than one mobile scenario, and hence both online and offline architectures might be required. In this case, the discrepancies between the two architectures will increase the cost and decrease the interoperability between different solutions. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes an innovative and lexible mobility enabled architecture that can be configured to be an online, an offline, or a mixed architecture in a unified framework. Using this architecture, different types (online, offline, or mixed) of mobile client applications could be built for different scenarios according to the user requirements. These applications can share the same mid-tier framework and access the same backend systems. Moreover, in this architecture, a unified access model to business logic is proposed to make it possible to adapt in time a mobile application from the online model to the offline model without architectural changes and vice versa. This paper introduces the basic requirements to build such an architecture, defines basic modules of the architecture and shows how to adapt this architecture to different (online, offline, or mixed) architectures using different configurations.

A context-dependent XML compression approach to enable business applications on mobile devices

As the number of mobile device users increases, the need for mobile business applications development increases as well. However, such development is impeded by the limited resources available on typical mobile phones. This paper presents a context-dependent XML compression approach that enables the deployment of business applications on mobile devices. That is, the compressed XML document is not self-contained and cannot be de-compressed without using information shared between the sender and the recipient. By relying on shared information, we obtain a better compression ratio than existing context-free compression algorithms.

Ajax for mobility: mobileweaver ajax framework

This paper provides a brief description of a research project on using Ajax to enhance mobile Web applications for enterprise use. The project, known as MobileWeaver Ajax Framework, leverages enterprise SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and the latest web technologies on mobile devices.

Service-Oriented Mobile Applications for Ad-Hoc networks

Mobile phones are becoming a new popular platform for business applications. The number of mobile business users increases and so does the need for efficient mobile data exchange and collaboration. However, a traditional business application design approach is not suitable for mobile devices because of the limited memory and connection bandwidth. This paper presents a lightweight mobile SOA-based approach to interaction between business applications running on J2ME enabled devices such as cell phones. The paper includes position statement based on our experience and describes a prototype implementation of the architecture. The important features of our design are: using the knowledge of business processes workflow and XML compression to minimize data transferred; pro-active data push and allowing applications to fully function in a disconnected mode. The above approach results in a lightweight framework which can be used in order to develop a wide spectrum of business-oriented applications.

LAOF: A New Framework to Efficiently Process Business Objects on Resource Constrained Mobile Phones

The increase in the number of mobile device users has led to an increased demand for mobile business applications. One of the main challenges in developing mobile business applications is to efficiently process business data in the resource constrained environment of mobile phones. Current approaches are seriously limited by the non-guaranteed quality of network connections or the restricted processing capabilities of mobile phones. We propose a lightweight asynchronous online framework (LAOF) that merges the benefits of both online and offline models. In our approach, business data is partially and lazily replicated to mobile phones. The mobile application executes read-only operations locally and tentatively simulates local responses to write operations before asynchronously executing on the remote server. The LAOF improves the traditional lazy replication approach by 1) efficiently compressing business data for mobile applications, 2) separating the consistency requirements for responses and business data, and 3) providing an approach that guarantees causal dependency for the asynchronous execution of write operations on the server side. In addition, we also demonstrate a sample application based on this approach and use it to evaluate the framework.

An Integrated Lightweight Software Architecture for Mobile Business Applications

A growing number of mobile users prefer to access information and even make critical business decisions using their mobile phones. We present an integrated architecture developed at SAP Research as a platform for mobile business applications. The immediate goal is to allow mobile users to access information and services provided by the business back-end servers. The long-term goal is to develop techniques to overcome many problems mobile users face under such constraints as limited bandwidth, computational power and storage resources. The framework that we propose in this paper enables business applications connected to SAP through common mobile devices. SAP users can access business data and applications on the back- end server and execute tasks without a PC. We present components of the Lightweight Architecture (LWA) with specific components in the areas of data management, data compression, connectivity, and user interfaces.