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Although wireless grids have been originally thought of as isolated processing clusters, the possibility of their approaching – and connecting to – a fixed network allows for a huge expansion of their processing power, due to the resources available in wired grids potentially accessible through such a network. The interoperation of mobile ad hoc grids and resources available in wired grids is, however, a problem still to be tackled in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to tackle this problem.

A prototype is developed to demonstrate the feasibility of the interoperation between wireless and wired grids, thus providing a basis for the development of novel applications that can build on this interoperation.

The outcome of the paper comprises the analysis of the necessary requirements for the interoperation between wireless and wired grids, the proposal of two different interoperation approaches, and the provision of a qualitative assessment of the implications of these approaches.

There are many points that the authors intend to address as future work. First, they are aware of the need for performing some quantitative analyses of their proxy implementations. Second, they intend to investigate the possibility of mobile ad hoc grids to process tasks coming from wired grids. Third, they are interested in allowing the submission of tasks that present interdependencies (workflows) from mobile devices in the mobile ad hoc grid.

The paper investigates the interoperation of wireless and wired grids. Such an interoperation may open new perspectives of practical use of wireless devices in scenarios such as emergency response networks and field research systems, to name a few.

The paper provides a first step into the interoperation of wireless and wired grids, thus yielding a basis for the development of novel applications that can build upon this interoperation. This is believed to be of interest to both the grid and mobile computing communities.

The rapid proliferation of mobile context aware applications has resulted in an increased research interest towards developing specialized context data management strategies for mobile entities. The purpose of this paper is to aim to develop a new way to model mobile entities and manage their contexts accordingly.

This paper proposes the concept of “Mobile Space” to model mobile entities and presents strategies to manage the various contexts associated therein. To handle availability related issues, two system services are designed: the “Availability Updating Service” which is an identifier based mechanism and is designed to keep track of mobile objects and handle availability related issues, and the “Application Callback Service” which is a publish/subscribe based mechanism to handle application disruptions and interruptions arising due to mobility.

The paper presents a detailed study of the proposed framework and a description of the underlying services and the components therein to validate the framework. Experimental results carried out in WiFi and 3G environments indicate that the proposed techniques can support mobile applications and minimize application disruptions with minimal overhead.

The proposed context management framework is generic in nature and is not designed for a specific class of applications. Any mobile context aware application can leverage on the framework and utilize the provided functionalities to manage application disruptions. Also, the decoupling of mobile application layer and the underlying context data management layer renders context data management layer transparent to the application design.

Context awareness is one of the key aspects of pervasive computing systems. In such systems, a plethora of dynamic context information needs to be constantly retrieved, soundly interpreted, rapidly processed, maintained in various repositories, and securely disseminated. Thus, a flexible, scalable and interoperable context representation scheme needs to be established and solid context management mechanisms need to be adopted, which will perform well in large‐scale distributed pervasive systems. This paper elaborates on the COMPACT context middleware that has been designed to cope with the issues above and saturate pervasive computing environments with context awareness functionality.

This paper aims to demonstrate that a policy-based middleware solution which facilitates the development of context-aware applications and the integration of the heterogeneous devices should be provided for ubiquitous computing environments. Ubiquitous computing targets the provision of seamless services and applications by providing an environment that involves a variety of devices having different capabilities. These applications help transforming the physical spaces into computationally active and smart environments. The design of applications in these environments needs to consider the heterogeneous devices, applications preferences and rapidly changing contexts. The applications, therefore, need to be context-aware so that they can adapt to different situations in real-time.

In this paper, we argue that a policy-based middleware solution that facilitates the development of context-aware applications and the integration of the heterogeneous devices should be provided for ubiquitous computing environments. The middleware allows applications to track items and acquire contextual information about them easily, reason about this information captured using different logics and then adapt to changing contexts. A key issue in these environments is to allow heterogeneous applications to express their business rules once, and get the preferred data once they are captured by the middleware without any intervention from the application side.

Our middleware tackles this problem by using policies to define the different applications’ rules and preferences. These policies can specify rules about the middleware services to be used, type of data captured, devices used, user roles, context information and any other type of conditions.

In this paper, we propose the design of a flexible and performant ubiquitous computing, and context-aware middleware called FlexRFID along with its evaluation results.

Using Internet‐enabled mobile handheld devices to access the World Wide Web is a promising addition to the Web and traditional e‐commerce. Mobile handheld devices provide convenience and portable access to the huge information on the Internet for mobile users from anywhere and at anytime. However, mobile commerce has not enjoyed the same level of success as the e‐commerce has so far because mobile Web contents are scarce and mostly awkward for browsing. The major reason of the problems is most software engineers are not familiar with handheld devices, let alone programming for them. To help software engineers better understand this subject, this article gives a comprehensive study of handheld computing and programming for mobile commerce. It includes five major topics: (i) mobile commerce systems, (ii) mobile handheld devices, (iii) handheld computing, (iv) server‐side handheld computing and programming, and (v) client‐side handheld computing and programming. The most popular server‐side handheld applications are mostly functioning through mobile Web contents, which are constructed by using only few technologies and languages. On the other hand, various environments/languages are available for client‐side handheld computing and programming. Five of the most popular are (i) BREW, (ii) J2ME, (iii) Palm OS, (iv) Symbian OS, and (v) Windows Mobile. They are using either C/C++ or Java programming languages. This article will explain J2ME, a micro version of Java, and Palm OS programming, using C, by giving step‐by‐step procedures of J2ME and Palm application development.

This paper describes the architecture of using the Mobile Agent and ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability) in Mobile e-Learning (mLearning). In the coming years, there will be an incremental amount of mobile learning experiments for the purpose of implementing mobile ICTs into mainstream education. In this article, the Replication Agent and Snapshot Agent architecture is proposed as an effective way to overcome the problem of heavy loading on the limited bandwidth used in wireless transmission for mobile learning environment merge replication process. The implementation of mobile agents as middleware for mLearning environment is to provide database replication between learners and off-site database e.g., Knowledge Management Centre's (KMC) databases using handheld devices. The approach using the combination of both these agents plays an important role in wireless transmission. It provides an intelligent solution to the limitation of the wireless bandwidth by lowering the bandwidth taken up during the bursts of mobile transactions. In this proposed technique, a mLearning database is determined as a Snapshot publisher where a compact edition of files and information is generated at the snapshot location which resides on the central database server. Learners may retrieve quick bursts of information through mobile applications wirelessly. The Replication Agent offers the flexibility to move from one site (user) to another (central database) for essential data synchronization. In order to provide learners with appropriate courses, a prototype on mLearning platform supporting three-layered structure and device adapting was put forward. The architecture of the platform discussed in this study as the mobile agent approach would facilitate more widespread use of mLearning, including in courses discussions between learners and academicians.

Context‐awareness is an essential property of any pervasive system perceiving its environment. Such a system captures and processes context, i.e. the features describing the relevant aspects of environment state and user behaviour. However, development of these systems still requires solving a number of research and engineering challenges. The purpose of this paper is to propose perception framework, a RESTful middleware which simplifies and accelerates the development of pervasive systems. Perception framework allows constructing services' application logic using rules and context. Moreover, it collects sensor data and produces the context information that is required for the rules. The authors present the architecture, design, complete implementation, and prototype‐based verification of perception framework.

Development of context‐aware services is achieved with a novel architecture supporting building of the logic of web services using rules which directly manipulate the available elementary context represented with the Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontology. These rules are described using the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) with support for different rule languages. The implementation of this framework is aligned with RESTful principles, providing a lightweight and flexible solution for large‐scale context‐aware systems.

The fully implemented prototype verifies the feasibility of constructing the logic of context‐aware web services with the rules supported by perception framework.

The contributions of this paper include: the requirement specification for a generic context‐aware pervasive middleware; and the design and implementation of the framework (i.e. perception framework) supporting the development of context‐aware web services. The perception framework includes a generic rule‐based reasoner allowing developers to use several RIF‐compliant rule description languages.

Robot localization technology has been widely studied for decades and a lot of remarkable approaches have been developed. However, in practice, this technology has hardly been applied to common day-to-day deployment scenarios. The purpose of this paper is to present a novel approach that focuses on improving the localization robustness in complicated environment.

The localization robustness is improved by dynamically switching the localization components (such as the environmental camera, the laser range finder and the depth camera). As the components are highly heterogeneous, they are developed under the robotic technology component (RTC) framework. This simplifies the developing process by increasing the potential for reusability and future expansion. To realize this switching, the localization reliability for each component is modeled, and a configuration method for dynamically selecting dependable components at run-time is presented.

The experimental results show that this approach significantly decreases robot lost situation in the complicated environment. The robustness is further enhanced through the cooperation of heterogeneous localization components.

A multi-component automatic switching approach for robot localization system is developed and described in this paper. The reliability of this system is proved to be a substantial improvement over single-component localization techniques.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a model for identifying, storing and sharing contextual information across smartphone apps that uses the native device services. The authors present the idea of using user input and interaction within an app as contextual information, and how each app can identify and store contextual information.

Contexts are modeled as hierarchical objects that can be stored and shared by applications using native mechanisms. A proof-of-concept implementation of the model for the Android platform demonstrates contexts modelled as hierarchical objects stored and shared by applications using native mechanisms.

The model was found to be practically viable by implemented sample apps that share context and through a performance analysis of the system.

The contextual data-sharing model enables the creation of smart apps and services without being tied to any vendor’s cloud services.

This paper introduces a new approach for sharing context in smartphone applications that does not require cloud services.