Nuno Manuel Silva Costa

Virtual Machines Applied to WSN's: The state-of-the-art and classification

In the last few years, various middleware solutions have been proposed for bridging the gap between the complexity of the applications and the low hardware abstraction in order to program and manage the sensor nodes of the wireless sensor networks. The proposed middleware range from market and data- centric approaches to message oriented middleware. This survey discusses the representative state-of-the- art virtual machine (VM) class of middleware for WSNs highlighting the state of the research.

Wireless Body Area Networks for healthcare applications: protocol stack review

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) supporting healthcare applications are in early development stage but offer valuable contributions at monitoring, diagnostic, or therapeutic levels. They cover real-time medical information gathering obtained from different sensors with secure data communication and low power consumption. As a consequence of the increasing interest in the application of this type of networks, several articles dealing with different aspects of such systems have been published recently. In this paper, we compile and compare technologies and protocols published in the most recent researches, seeking WBAN issues for medical monitoring purposes to select the most useful solutions for this area of networking. The most important features under consideration in our analysis include wireless communication protocols, frequency bands, data bandwidth, transmission distance, encryption, authentication methods, power consumption, and mobility. Our study demonstrates that some characteristics of surveyed protocols are very useful to medical appliances and patients in a WBAN domain.

Fighting Elders’ Social and Technological Exclusion: The TV Based Approach

We are assisting to the fastest grow of senior population ever and that tendency has brought several challenges for governments, families and for the elderly. The society was not prepared for that. On the one hand, there are many elderly who live alone in the cities and, on the other hand, active people is moving to the cities looking for a better life while leaving behind the villages where they born and grow and the older family members. On the other side, everyone is expecting the aid of technology in order to solve or at least minimize this problem. This paper present a video-calling service targeted for elderly social and technological exclusion and promoting socialization while using recent technology embedded into well-known electronic devices like TVs. The evaluation of results showed that when assisted technology is encapsulated into everyday objects, older people can use it seamlessly, without any learning curve.

Peer-to-Peer Jini for Truly Service-Oriented WSNs

In the past, wireless sensor networks emerged and so did some state-of-the-art applications that ran above them. Most of those applications followed the centralized model and were mainly focused on environmental data gathering, where sensor nodes sensed data from the environment to be sent to an external data server for later processing. Further research took wireless sensor networks to new application areas and, today, this technology gained the ubiquitous status. However, the use of wireless sensor networks is still reserved to experts, mainly due to the huge gap between user applications and the network. This fact has led us to successfully develop a new software stack, capable of running in any sensor node even in the most resource-constrained ones. The new software stack offers a truly service-oriented approach to design and implement applications and follows a widely accepted programming language and programming paradigm.

Integration of Resource Poor Wireless Sensor Networks into Smart Spaces

Wireless Sensor networks (WSNs) have been referred to as one part of the background infrastructure required to achieve ubiquitous computing, where smart spaces are included. For instance, WSNs could be especially useful to compute the user context or even ‘context’ of mobile resources in general. To serve this purpose, wireless sensor network must expose some sort of service discovery and usage capability and be compatible with the nowadays ubiquitous technologies. In this paper we present a practical approach to bring WSNs, specially the ones built from resource poor sensor nodes, to participate into smart environments as ubiquitous devices. The approach addresses device heterogeneity, uses the state of the art and ubiquitous TCP/IP communication stack, is service driven and do not rely in any external resource rich device. As a result, we successfully created a Java based service discovery and usage protocol that is compliant with ad-hoc networks and resource constrained devices and a framework capable of produce the source and binary code ready to run on both resource constrained sensor nodes and PCs.

A Practical Solution for Automatic Service Discovery and Usage over Resource Poor Ad-hoc Sensor Networks

Ad-hoc networks present new challenges due to its mobility, lack of infrastructure and resource limited devices. This means that service discovery (and usage) protocols targeted for traditional networks are not suitable for ad-hoc networks because they usually rely on the fixed and high availability characteristics of nodes to run important services. Ad-hoc networks need service discovery protocols compliant with its mobility and changing topology. In this paper we present a practical solution capable of provide automatic service discovery and usage over ad-hoc networks of resource poor sensor nodes. The solution was not developed from the ground-up. Instead, it was based on a (successfully) solution for traditional networks but then modified to address ad-hoc networks while keeping it original semantics.

JavaScript Middleware for Mobile Agents Support on Desktop and Mobile Platforms

The evolution of technology in interconnection solutions such as Networks or the Internet, have allowed many communication architectures to be born and a varied interconnectivity. Here, we present a project that relies on the mobile agent computing paradigm. A middleware using the JavaScript language that allows the execution and ability to move mobile agents through the local network and Internet. This initiative arose as a way of dealing with problems raised by the considerable amount of existing Java based mobile agents middleware, which force the installation of the Java Virtual Machine in the devices, making complicated its execution in operating systems like macOS, iOS and others non-java friendly O.S. Our middleware works steadily in all operating systems, requiring only the installation of node.js. For mobile platforms the middleware is developed using React-native that allows it to run on mobile operating systems such as Android and iOS.