Nobuhiko Nishio

Smart furniture: improvising ubiquitous hot-spot environment

We developed Smart Furniture, which extemporaneously converts the legacy non-smart space into a Smart Hot-spot which consists of computational services. Since the Smart Furniture is equipped with networked computers, sensors and various I/O devices, it can provide various services by alone or by coordinating with other devices. In this paper, the physical structure and middlewares for the Smart Furniture are described. The prototype systems to realize Smart Hot-spot such as a Crossing Window System, an Active Authentication System for Library, a Mobile TV-phone System, and an Environmental Information Monitor System are also introduced.

Simplified Method for Session Coordination Using Multi-level QOS Specification and Translation

In multimedia systems, session coordination technique is important to accommodate a new session and re-distribute reclaimed resources when tough continuous media session is exiting. Although end-users do not want to specify the quality of service (QOS) in an exact memory size like in KB or KB/s of bandwidth, such rigid usages are necessary for admission control and coordination. Therefore, we introduce the multi-level quality specification and QOS translation mechanism to put it into the quantitative expression which the system can handle. Nonetheless, session coordination have demanded complicated computation or presented an NP-complete problem. Constraining QOS specification, we invent a simplified session coordination method which is feasible enough to actually implement. This paper reports experiments on QOS translation and multiple session coordination using the Conductor/Performer system on top of Real-Time Mach 3.0.

Evaluation of QoS-Control Servers on Real-Time Mach

In an interactive multimedia environment that handles multiple sessions dynamically, a mechanism to control QOS among sessions is very important. As such a mechanism, the QOS-Control Server has been developed on RT-Mach. This paper gives the results of several experiments with this server, and describes the extensions of RT-Mach.

Implementation and evaluation of Wapplet framework

It is important for application programmers and users to easily control networked appliances and devices without the need to be aware of their locations. In particular, network transparent control is essential for the ubiquitous computing environment. This is because end-users accomplish their tasks by coordinating devices that they are wearing, such as wearable computers and cellular phones, with various networked appliances, such as display devices and loud speakers. This paper presents the Wapplet framework, a new application framework that addresses this issue for the ubiquitous computing environment. To show the efficiency of the proposed Wapplet framework, we have evaluated it in terms of processing time.

Wapplet: A Media Access Framework for Wearable Applications

This paper presents a new framework for constructing applications for wearable computers. We do not consider wearable computing merely as a single self-confined system. Rather, wearable computing can be treated as a cooperative application with information surrounding a person and various devices attached to him/her. We have developed a framework of such wearable computing called Wapplet. Wapplet provides adaptation to the availability of devices as well as a systematic scheme of constructing applications for wearable computing. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of Wapplet, and show its prototype system.

Design and implementation of adaptive service disconnect/reconnect support mechanism

In this paper, we describe the design and implementations of adaptive service disconnect/reconnect support mechanism, which supports adaptation to the change in service availability. The service availability changes when the user migrates and causes network disconnection and reconnection. This mechanism supports continuous use of service by correctly suspending upon disconnection, and resuming on re-connection. The mechanism also supports recovery in case of failure to suspend. While disconnected, the mechanism supports disconnected operation by both the user and the service. Through this mechanism, the user can utilize the services around him effectively while migrating. We propose adaptive service disconnect/reconnect support (ASDS) which detects the network disconnection and re-connection, by monitoring the wireless LANs signal noise ratio. ASDS also predicts network disconnections through changes in SNR, and suspends if necessary ASDS can suspend and resume with the appropriate timing. We design and implement ASDS, and evaluate it in the actual wireless network environment.

End-to-Edge QoS System Integration: Integrated Resource Reservation Framework for Mobile Internet

In order to support QoS-aware applications in a mobile Internet environment, it is essential to achieve effective end-to-end QoS control so that these applications can dynamically adapt to various changes in the network resources or environment. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of our integrated End-to-Edge QoS framework which consists of mechanism for resource reservation, the QoS translation, and the QoS arbitration.

Improvised assembly mechanism for VNA applications

This paper proposes an improvised assembly mechanism (IAM), a novel mechanism for constructing virtual network appliances (VNA). IAM enables the automatic assembly of VNA with distributed functional components in a component-initiated and ad-hoc manner.