Martin Gerdes

Phone-Controlled Delivery of NGN Services into Residential Environments

The horizontally layered architecture of the IMS/NGN standards family enables the delivery of services independent of access network and requesting device. In this article, the authors propose a further separation of service control and delivery, allowing the requesting device – in particular a users mobile phone – to invite other devices (we will focus on DLNA appliances) into the service delivery, enhancing both user experience and service design flexibility. The proposed solution builds on exploiting proximity technologies (e.g. barcodes, NFC) for pairing the control device with a remote environment. Motivated by scenarios, the architecture concepts are explained and a prototype that was implemented for validation is described. Selected findings and a short overview of related standardization efforts conclude the paper.

Learning automaton based on-line discovery and tracking of spatio-temporal event patterns

Discovering and tracking of spatio-temporal patterns in noisy sequences of events is a difficult task that has become increasingly pertinent due to recent advances in ubiquitous computing, such as community-based social networking applications. The core activities for applications of this class include the sharing and notification of events, and the importance and usefulness of these functionalites increases as event-sharing expands into larger areas of ones life. Ironically, instead of being helpful, an excessive number of event notifications can quickly render the functionality of event-sharing to be obtrusive. Rather, any notification of events that provides redundant information to the application/user can be seen to be an unnecessary distraction. In this paper, we introduce a new scheme for discovering and tracking noisy spatio-temporal event patterns, with the purpose of suppressing reoccurring patterns, while discerning novel events. Our scheme is based on maintaining a collection of hypotheses, each one conjecturing a specific spatio-temporal event pattern. A dedicated Learning Automaton (LA) - the Spatio-Temporal Pattern LA (STPLA) - is associated with each hypothesis. By processing events as they unfold, we attempt to infer the correctness of each hypothesis through a real-time guided random walk. Consequently, the scheme we present is computationally efficient, with a minimal memory footprint. Furthermore, it is ergodic, allowing adaptation. Empirical results involving extensive simulations demonstrate the STPLAs superior convergence and adaptation speed, as well as an ability to operate successfully with noise, including both the erroneous inclusion and omission of events. Additionally, the results included, which involve a so-called Presence Sharing application, are both promising and in our opinion, impressive. It is thus our opinion that the proposed STPLA scheme is, in general, ideal for improving the usefulness of event notification and sharing systems, since it is capable of significantly, robustly and adaptively suppressing redundant information.

Media Delivery to Remote Renderers Controlled by the Mobile Phone

In todays content delivery solutions, service delivery and control are still tightly coupled, a service typically being delivered to the same device that controls the session. We present a solution that was designed with the goal to decouple service control and delivery. Using our approach, multimedia streaming services can be delivered to off-the-shelf DLNA devices in visited networks. The service provider receives information about the remote media player and access environment via a mobile phone. Proximity technologies (e.g. barcodes, NFC) of the control device are used for the exchange of required credentials. This paper describes a typical scenario and our prototype implementation.

Delivering Internet Media Services to Consumer Electronics Devices in Personal Networks

DLNA devices, by definition, do not support remote connectivity. Even if attached to a LAN that is connected to the Internet, they can generally not be used to consume streamed or downloadable media. By providing a gateway in a mobile phone that exposes a remote Digital Media Server on the LAN, content from different online sources can be made available on locally connected media renderers. Adding to this, the capabilities of the mobile phone can be used to publish presence information of the devices, for example to enable remote control of home appliances for energy management. This paper describes a demonstration of how Internet media services are delivered to devices in a personal network, using the mobile phone as a service control point.

Cellular networking technologies in ITS solutions: opportunities and challenges

The Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) domain is already today the leading vertical industry sector for the adoption of cellular connectivity. In-built and brought-in access to mobile telecommunication networks is a key enabler for advanced safety, navigation and infotainment services. n nThe growing complexity of the industry ecosystem as well as the diverse service requirements put on the underlying connectivity and service enablement infrastructure demand for open, flexible and scalable end-to-end ITS solutions. n nIn this paper we present scenarios, solution requirements, service enablers and an end-to-end ITS system architecture, covering in-vehicle and backend components, connectivity solutions and service life-cycle management. While we put specific emphasis on presenting opportunities and challenges relating to cellular ITS solutions, we also point out aspects relating to the required marriage with Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) systems. n nComplemented by experiences from projects with industry partners and the research community and by reflections on ongoing efforts in ITS standardization, we conclude that only by a combination of cellular and DSRC networking technologies the full range of consumer and business needs will be addressed.

An intelligent architecture for service provisioning in pervasive environments

The vision of pervasive environments is being realized more than ever with the proliferation of services and computing resources located in our surrounding environments. Identifying those services that deserve the attention of the user is becoming an increasingly-challenging task. In this paper, we present an adaptive multi-criteria decision making mechanism for recommending relevant services to the mobile user. In this context, “Relevance” is determined based on a user-centric approach that combines both the reputation of the service, the users current context, the users profile, as well as a record of the history of recommendations. Our decision making mechanism is adaptive in the sense that it is able to cope with users contexts that are changing and drifts in the users interests, while it simultaneously can track the reputations of services, and suppress repetitive notifications based on the history of the recommendations. The paper also includes some brief but comprehensive results concerning the task of tracking service reputations by analyzing and comprehending Word-of-Mouth communications, as well as by suppressing repetitive notifications. We believe that our architecture presents a significant contribution towards realizing intelligent and personalized service provisioning in pervasive environments.

Mobile Payment Solutions

Mobile telecommunication has become a pillar of the everyday communication both in global business and society. The number of people using mobile devices is growing rapidly. New protocols and technologies like WAP, GPRS and UMTS enable powerful applications and the expansion of the known Internet towards a Mobile Internet. New mobile services and applications emerge that require payment methods for information, goods or the service itself. For payments involving a mobile phone special restrictions have to be taken into account. An investigation of selected existing mobile payment solutions under consideration of security risks and possible improvements will be presented, concluded by a comparison of used security mechanisms.