Zoe Antoniou

Intuitive Mobile User Interaction in Smart Spaces via NFC-Enhanced Devices

The fusion of interaction and discovery technologies can facilitate easy, intuitive and impromptu access to networked entities by users without the need for significant administrative overhead. Traditional service discovery methods fail to meet the demands placed by such environments due to mobility, intermittent connectivity, complex configuration and small user interfaces. This paper presents n NFC-enhanced middleware architecture that enables a non-expert user to intuitively discover and use new services through a simple touch gesture. The proposed method eliminates the need for multiple manual steps and allows the user to control the ingress of devices/services in the environment into the discovery process. A prototype implementation is presented showcasing attachment to network access points, launching of URLs and discovery and interaction with UPnP devices.

IP transport in 3G radio access networks: an MPLS-based approach

An IP transport scheme for third generation radio access networks (3G RAN) based on multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) technology is proposed. The basic idea is to establish and manage label switched paths for interconnecting base stations and radio network controllers. This scheme incorporates constraint-based routing and Diffserv to provide transport bears that can support bandwidth provisioning and a variety of QoS requirements in the RAN.

An efficient deadline-credit-based transport scheme for prerecorded semisoft continuous media applications

In this paper, an efficient scheme is proposed based on the introduced deadline-credit-based (DC) policy. This scheme is appropriate for any prerecorded media, but is particularly relevant for prerecorded semisoft continuous media (CM) applications. Semisoft are applications with very small initial delay tolerance and, thus, for which very small amount of content may be sent in advance. The proposed policy pushes content toward the end user during the session by taking advantage of any bandwidth underutilization periods, exploiting available storage, and building up fairly a deadline credit to be consumed during periods of overutilization. The scheduling policy is studied for the single-hop case (applicable to the server of the content), as well as for the multihop case (applicable to the server and network nodes). The derived results demonstrate the ability of the proposed scheme to decrease the amount of required bandwidth (or equivalently induced losses) with respect to alternative schemes without requiring large initial delay, which is not acceptable for semisoft CM applications.

Intuitive Service Discovery in RFID-enhanced networks

This paper presents an architecture for easy configuration and intuitive interaction between non-expert users and smart devices. It employs RFID (NFC) object tagging to enable service discovery through simple touch gestures. With this new paradigm, the physical space becomes an extension of the traditional mobile device GUI. In addition, an extensible RFID tag record is described that can be used in a variety of service discovery scenarios. A brief security analysis is included to address potential threats. The proposed approach is further illustrated through a technical realisation based on the UPnP framework. An example use case is selected and the step-by-step process of self-configuration, service discovery and user interaction is described

A hybrid P2P/Infrastructure platform for personal and social Internet services

While pure Web-based services and P2P technologies are popular for personal and social networking, they both have inherent limitations. A hybrid P2P/Infrastrucutre approach could leverage strengths and address limitations of both paradigms. In this paper we propose such a platform based on MyNet, our P2P personal and social networking system. The new hybrid architecture enhances the properties of pervasive access, security and ease of use found in MyNet through the introduction of infrastructure-hosted MyNet Virtual Devices (MVD). MVDs act as userspsila personal devices, but also host MyNet-aware Internet services (MaIS), proxies for 3rd party Internet services. A proof-of-concept prototype and user results are presented to showcase key system features.

Improving restorability in radio access network

In the past, wireless network reliability issues have received limited attention. Previously proposed solutions have focused on protection against base station failures, which may require significantly more base stations than necessary. Actual data from wireless carriers suggest that problems in the backhaul are the uttermost reliability problems faced, and is therefore the main focus of this work. Current radio access networks are based on tree and star-like topologies, which have no inherent restorability properties. We propose a heuristic topology enhancement method that adds redundant spans and upgrades existing infrastructure cost-effectively, in order to create partially meshed architectures that could provide the desired level of restorability against single span failure scenarios. Both span and path restoration techniques are explored. The algorithm was tested using several different variants of restoration mechanisms. Results show that the proposed heuristic algorithm is able to achieve reasonably good solutions in a time scale that is several orders of magnitude faster than an optimization approach based on binary integer programming formulation.

Earliest due first scheduling for application-level QoS delivery

The quality of service (QoS) of real time applications is affected in a rather direct manner by the timely delivery of application-level data units which are typically mapped into several ATM cells. As a consequence, it would be reasonable to associate a common deadline with all the cells in one data unit (batch) and develop a scheduling policy that aims to maximise the number of data units that are delivered by their respective deadlines. A batch-based earliest due first scheduling policy is proposed and analysed under periodic batch arrival processes which are typical of continuous media streams. Depending on whether partial batch service is performed or not, two variations of this scheduler are considered. It is shown that the proposed policies can be easily implemented in terms of a first batch in-first batch out (FBI-FBO) and a partial FBI-FBO schedulers respectively. Numerical results are presented and the induced batch and cell loss rates are compared against those induced by the standard FIFO scheduler as well as a FIFO scheduler which drops expired cells.

P2P social networking for the rest of US

The user experience of current P2P Personal and Social networking systems does not meet the usability needs of the technically naive users. This is the motivation behind MyNet, a P2P platform that enables non-expert users to easily organize their resources and share them in their immediate social neighborhood. In this paper, we present our experience following a user-centered approach in designing MyNet: using real-world metaphors in the core system, leveraging NFC-based touch to mirror human behavior models, and involving actual users in the design process. The results of our 50-user usability evaluation are also presented in detail.

Deadline credit scheduling policy for prerecorded sources

In this paper a scheduling policy is proposed, called the deadline credit (DC) policy, which focuses on the efficient scheduling of prerecorded continuous media traffic. Its objectives are (a) to utilize all (if possible) of the available capacity by allocating bandwidth dynamically to a number of data streams, (b) to distribute the available bandwidth fairly between all competing data streams and (c) to maximise the number of application data units (ADUs) that are served by always giving priority to the one with the shortest time to expiration. Numerical results are presented and the induced ADUs loss rates under the proposed policy are compared against those of some alternative schemes.

Using RFID-based “Touch” for Intuitive User Interaction with Smart Space Security

Home networks and networked consumer electronic devices are increasingly becoming a part of our everyday lives. One of the challenges in designing smart home technology is making these systems secure and, at the same time, easy-to-use for non-expert consumers. We believe that mobile devices equipped with a “touch” network interface and corresponding middleware are ideal for enabling users to intuitively setup and manage the security of their smart homes. In this chapter, we describe such a middleware for mobile phones based on Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. We propose a mobile middleware architecture called iTouchSec based on a higher level User-Interaction with Security (UI-SEC) middleware, called IntuiSec, and a lower level NFC middleware, called iTouch. We present the overall architecture, as well as the detailed design of the necessary NFC records that are exchanged over RF. Finally, we present our experience with an initial implementation of parts of the proposed middleware using actual NFC hardware and Symbian-based mobile phones.