Omar Abuelma'atti

Managing Distributed Networked Appliances in Home Networks

Recent years have seen an exponential growth in the use of home networks, from the Internet-enabled PC to network-enabled home appliances. Ordinary and everyday appliances used in the home will increasingly become integral components of these networks. They are required to join, leave, and self-configure in accordance with their dynamic environment. New platforms and applications are needed to mediate interactions between devices to overcome the inherent problems, limitations, and costs of bespoke solutions. While combining our disparate devices to meet future needs is challenging, it will also allow for better exploitation of networked devices to provide obvious benefits to the consumer. A number of approaches and technologies that attempt to redress this issue exist; however, they are not without their own disadvantages. This paper discusses these technologies and introduces some of the novel approaches that have been proposed to address the issue of device autoconfiguration using peer-to-peer technologies. In this way, disparate devices are able to achieve self-management without user interaction. A case study is also presented to illuminate these approaches and demonstrate the applicability of our approach.

Dynamic service composition in home appliance networks

The proliferation of networked appliances and the complex functions they provide make it ever harder for a specialist, let alone an ordinary home user, to configure them to provide a given service. The use of flexible middleware architectures, combined with application level services will allow for better exploitation of these features both for the benefit of performance and simplicity. For example, a TV, DVD player and radio all have output speakers and are capable of producing sound, however there is no common framework to harness this functionality. In this paper we address this issue and propose a home network architecture that interconnects home appliances and their associated services using descriptive ontologies to guide the composition process itself. In this network, home appliances are interconnected using a Service Integration Controller (SIC), which discovers and dynamically composes the services they provide and efficiently coordinates the communications between all services independent of the protocol being used. The prototype we implemented uses a home entertainment system as a case study and shows that this framework fulfils the requirements of the system design.

SCCIR: Smart Cities Critical Infrastructure Response Framework

Critical infrastructures play important roles in ensuring the wellbeing of the populace. Protecting critical infrastructures and ensuring their continued operation will be an important part of future Smart City ecosystems. Minimising the destruction of failing critical infrastructure components or system components that are geographically close critical services is essential. Equally important are the system of systems relationships that a failing system has, as these could render a minor system critical under certain circumstances. Infrastructure failure is usually brought under control through system adaptation e.g. using sensor area networks to close valves or by emergency response e.g. extinguishing fires. Current response procedures rely on antiquated information sharing techniques and provide little or no opportunity to effect change within the failing infrastructures systems. There may also be minimal understanding of the important systems of systems role that is being provided by components of the failing system. This paper details our initial work on the Smart Cities Critical Infrastructure response framework. The goal of our framework is to provide a response strategy to first responders based on smart cities information flows. Where these information flows have been compromised we propose a robust infrastructure state preservation system as to provide an interface to a failing critical infrastructure.

Implicit functionality: dynamic services composition for home networked appliances

The proliferation of networked appliances and the increased complexity associated with their configuration requires considerable effort from specialists and home users alike. Many of the common applications they offer and the sophisticated functions they support could be better utilised to increase performance and ensure simplicity. For example a TV, DVD player and radio have all got output speakers and they are capable of producing sound, but there is no common framework to harness these functionalities. In this paper we propose a framework that enables implicit functionalities in a home appliances network. In this network, home appliances are structured around a central service integration controller (SIC), which integrates the sen ices they offer and coordinates the communications between all service-enabled appliances, independent of the protocol type being used. Implicit functionalities can be formed based on the SICs ability to discover and dynamically compose services to form specific configurations, which are only limited by the users imagination. The prototype we implemented uses a home entertainment theatre system as a case study and shows that this framework not only fulfils the requirements of the paper but also gives rise to a number of issues such as the service-enabled appliance architecture and macro-scale services composition and its security.

IoMANETs: Mobility architecture for wireless M2M networks

Machine-to-Machine Low Power Mobile devices and Mobile MESH networks will become ubiquitous in the future Internet of Things. Mobile Networks will need to interact with static networks to insure continuous connectivity with the core Internet. Maintaining device connectivity whilst mobile will provide increased Machine-to-Machine interaction. This will in turn provide greater fidelity to higher level decision making systems. Mobile Mesh networks could become fragmented during their operation, leading to an inter connectivity requirement between fragments. It is anticipated that critical infrastructure will also utilise M2M Internet of Things technology and require mobility architectures to be fault tolerant. This will require schemes that enable the continued operation of a system whilst sections are asleep or in a failed state due to power exhaustion or attack. This paper introduces the Indirection Overlay for MANETs (IoMANETs) mobility framework. IoMANETs initial design provides a fault tolerant, scalable solution to the Internet of Things mobility problem.

Position-Relative Identities in the Internet of Things: An Evolutionary GHT Approach

The Internet of Things (IoT) will result in the deployment of many billions of wireless embedded systems creating interactive pervasive environments. It is envisaged that devices will cooperate to provide greater system knowledge than the sum of its parts. In an emergency situation, the flow of data across the IoT may be disrupted, giving rise to a requirement for machine-to-machine interaction within the remaining ubiquitous environment. Geographic hash tables (GHTs) provide an efficient mechanism to support fault-tolerant rendezvous communication between devices. However, current approaches either rely on devices being equipped with a GPS or being manually assigned an identity. This is unrealistic when the majority of these systems will be located inside buildings and will be too numerous to expect manual configuration. Additionally, when using GHT as a distributed data store, imbalance in the topology can lead to storage and routing overhead. This causes unfair work load, exhausting limited power supplies as well as causing poor data redundancy. To deal with these issues, we propose an approach that balances graph-based layout identity assignment, through the application of multifitness genetic algorithms. Our experiments show through simulation that our multifitness evolution technique improves on the initial graph-based layout, providing devices with improved balance and reachability metrics.

Multi hop communication in global wireless framework

Mobile ad-hoc networks are infrastructure-free highly dynamic wireless networks, where central administration or configuration by the user is impractical. This paper highlights the questions of allowing all the wireless ad hoc devices to use the same network address in a global wireless framework. It presents the paradigm of using auto-assigned, private non-internet-routable IP addresses as the basis to provide anytime, anywhere services to nomadic end users in the information space. It follows on from our work on integrating personal mobility services architectures and interoperating wireless networked appliances. Providing a multi-hop communication over a series of users devices each acting as a multi-port MAC bridge constructs an interoperable, interworking domain allowing applications to run seamlessly in the upper layers. We discuss the case of the IEEE 802.11 protocol specification where we present working scenarios and protocols used to initialise and maintain the operation of its multi-hop communications. It is an attempt to provide a better range of services in an interoperable heterogeneous domain to offering the services from both the network side and the local environment by means of multi-hop ad-hoc MAC bridges.

The Flexible Service Composition Framework for Networked Appliances

Developments in information technology and networking are rapidly driving the enhancement of networked appliances in the home environment. Users can request services from networked appliances via the home network framework and makes it possible to provide new concomitant capability by composing a virtual appliance. However, due to the vast number of home networked appliances and their complicated services, such composition can prove challenging for the non-technical home user. In this paper, we present the components of our framework for providing automatic service composition in networked appliances that uses both centralized and decentralized mechanisms the hardware implementation details for the framework, and demonstrate our hardware initial implementation.

A wireless networked appliances interoperability architecture

In recent years, advances in multimedia applications, services and intelligent networked appliances have been making ubiquitous home environments a reality. Broadband is becoming a part of our household infrastructure, in the same way we receive water, gas and electricity. It is envisaged that every device will have a network interface that allows it to be accessed and controlled from anywhere in the world. This idea is generating a great deal of interest where sound business models are being developed to realise such applications based on market and user needs. That will map the future direction of Internet and home technologies. However, despite the long list of advantages of enabling these choices, they produced many other consequences and challenges; notably, interoperability and the difficulties associated with the integration of combined functionalities. In this paper we detail our approach in solving the interoperability problem presented in our wireless networked appliances interoperability architecture (WNAIA). We present the architecture components design and our implementation details that prove the functionality of the architecture.

A mobile health monitoring application for obesity management and control using the internet-of-things

Obesity is one of the most serious and dangerous nutrition disorder around the world. Usually, people develop patterns of unhealthy eating that lead to increased body weight and accumulation of fat in the body. There are many reasons for that as suggested by researchers; one of the reasons is the imbalance between the energy intake from food and energy consumed in the body, which can possibly lead to increased body weight. One of the primary treatments for this serious health risk include diets, physical activity, weight-loss training and adoption of health programs that promote healthy eating. As such, reliable mechanism to prevent and control the obesity levels is vital. It led many experts and researchers who are interested in the health sector to explore more solutions that help to combat the obesity phenomenon. This paper presents a mobile health application intended to increase the awareness levels of parents and children about the obesity risks and help them to sustain balanced and healthy eating lifestyle. The proposed mobile application is an educational tool for the evaluation of interventions to prevent obesity risk levels. The application is based on the Internet-of-Things approach, which allows tracking food intake, remote capturing and constant monitoring of children data with interactive feedback displayed on the mobile application.