Michio Shimomura

Designing carrier's online storage “family cloud” for enhancing telecom home services

Many fixed-line carriers are providing online storage service, which stores user data through their broadband access network, as a typical application service that utilizes their networks advantages such as wide bandwidth. However, many of these services are not providing unique use cases that are different from over-the-top (OTT) personal online storage services. To facilitate the creation of new telecom online storage services, we propose the concept of a “family cloud”, an online storage platform logically connected directly to a household via a fixed broadband access line. The tight coupling of a family cloud and the carrier network facilitates handling of new in-home online storage use cases, including enhancement of existing home telecom services. In this paper, we clarify the family cloud concept and report our extensive investigation of its use case scenarios, our design of a functional architecture that can cover the scenarios, and our application of the architecture to a sample service to verify the concepts validity.

Designing of a Network-Aware Cloud Robotic Sensor Observation Framework

This paper proposes a network-aware cloud networked robotic sensor observation framework based on the topic-based publisher/subscriber messaging paradigm. Cloud network robotics systems have some advantages in making use of rich computation or storage resources of clouds, low maintenance cost, and easy development of applications. But a problem occurs when systems that need fast feedback from application modules are run over networks with intermittent connection. In this framework, the placement of the robot application modules is changed according to the QoS provided by the physical network. We also propose a map cell-based robotic sensor observation algorithm that suits to the framework. A prototype system of a data center monitoring robot that is based on the proposed framework and algorithm is implemented and a preliminary experiment was carried out to demonstrate the benefit of the system. The experiment result shows that the performance of the data center monitoring could be improved and hot spots can be found faster by making the cloud networked robot network-aware.

Walking support by dangerous obstacles notification using an electronic white cane

People with visual impairment always might knock up against dangerous obstacles while walking, because they cannot visually get the situation. Recently electronic white canes which have sensors and provide visually impaired persons with obstacle information, have been developed. This paper proposes the method that can detect dangerous obstacles correctly and can inform visually impaired persons of them effectively. By the experiment results its effectiveness has been clarified.

Cost reduction effect on running costs in ISMS based on sensors

The ICT environment has been rapidly developed by cloud computing and has become far more convenient to use. However, negative sides also exist, such as threats of viruses and unlawful access, meaning a safe and secure ICT environment is threatened. An information security management system (ISMS) is desirable to manage safe and secure use of the ICT environment in enterprises. However, the ISMS is difficult to deploy because of its cost. In this paper, we propose the use of sensors to reduce the cost of ISMS deployment, and we clarify their effect.

IMS/NGN Service Lab: Testbed for Creating Innovative IMS/NGN Service Applications

NTT is implementing NGN based on IMS standards. This paper overviews an IMS/NGN test bed in NTT laboratories which is dedicated for the composition and deployment of innovative services over future NGN by using its rich application and service support functions. Two issues experienced during construction and how we solved them are explained.