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Web services refer to a specific set of technologies used to implement a Service Oriented Architecture. Thanks to maturing Web‐services standards, and to new mobile devices and application solutions, progress is being made in presenting similar Web‐services offerings in both mobile and fixed networks. To bring that architecture and the solutions it will support to the world of mobility is indeed a significant issue in m‐business applications, because mobile Web services present various advantages: Reduction of the overall cost of development (by reusing existing system components), faster time to market introduction of products (provided by applications’ rapid development and deployment) and remarkable possibilities to emerge new applications with increased functionalities. In addition, the new and forthcoming mobile networks, with native IP connection and high speed transmission capability, allow the development of a variety of modern multimedia services. Multimedia Messaging Services (capable to mix the media types in order to enable more intuitive messaging operation), and Instant Messaging and Presence Services (dedicated for presence, instant messaging, and distribution and sharing of multimedia content in groups of users), provide suitable underlying capabilities to support location‐based and context‐sensitive multimedia services. In this paper we will present the current approaches regarding architectural, functional and security features that allow enterprises to enjoy the benefits of traditional Web services in the mobile multimedia domain.

Affordable mobile devices with video playback functionality are rapidly growing in the market. Current wireless and third generation communication networks enable smoother and higher quality streaming video. With the support of these technologies, most participants in telecom value‐added service chain are planning to shift their business focus to a more profitable and appealing area, mobile TV. Previous work that survey on users' behavior while consuming mobile TV has indicated that users normally watch brief and casual contents, and not the full program. However, most of the current services adopt a “push” approach since users passively receive pre‐defined contents, rather than pulling the interesting topics and segments. In order to promote a more enjoyable and rewarding watching experience, this paper will propose a framework to support a fully interactive mobile TV. The main goal is to enable users to: 1) visually locate interesting topics across multiple genres (such as news, sports and entertainment) and 2) fully control the playback flow of the multimedia items while selecting the most interesting segments. A web‐based system has been developed to implement and test the effectiveness of the proposed framework in a wireless and mobile setting.

This paper aims to describe MoM-NOCS, a Framework and a System that support communities with common interests in nature to capture and share multimedia observations of nature objects or events using mobile devices.

The observations are automatically associated with contextual metadata that allow them to be visualized on top of 2D or 3D maps. The observations are managed by a multimedia management system, and annotated by the same and/or other users with common interests. Annotations made by the crowd support the knowledge distillation of the data and data provenance processes in the system.

MoM-NOCS is complementary and interoperable with systems that are managed by natural history museums like MMAT (Makris et al., 2013) and biodiversity metadata management systems like BIOCASE (BioCASE) and GBIF (GBIF) so that they can link to interesting observations in the system, and the statistics of the observations that they manage can be visualized by the software.

The Framework offers rich functionality for visualizing the observations made by the crowd as function of time.

The purpose of this paper is to develop various measures and visualizations that reflect differences in the maturity and characteristics of mobile services. The visualizations and measures support market research processes with a recently developed handset‐based mobile service research tool.

A new handset‐based mobile service research platform was used in the study. This platform provides both questionnaire data and accurate usage‐level measurement data. The dataset included 695 Finnish smartphone users from year 2006, and 565 users from 2005.

Penetration, usage concentration and usage diversity indices illustrate how mobile voice has already reached the mass market and consequently relatively small differences in usage intensities among end‐users exist. On the contrary, many new services such as multimedia and internet browsing still catch quite explorative instead of sustainable usage. User preferences towards emerging mobile services are more heterogeneous than towards mature services. The distribution of usage in new services is quite skewed, whereas more linear cumulative distributions can be observed with mature services. Service life‐cycle reflects in measurement results.

The research includes data only from early‐adopter users. In addition, many background variables are missing that could explain some of the results. In particular, the supply side of the market is inadequately modeled.

The research shows that only a handset‐based data collection method provides accurate enough data to do cross‐service studies in today's more and more complex mobile service market.

The contribution of the paper is its unique data collection method, which makes this kind of accurate analysis possible. Handset‐based data can be efficiently used in micro‐level comparisons of user behavior or service usage patterns. Many of the studied services are such that, for example, network‐based research tools do not provide adequate possibilities for collection of data. The handset‐based research method is the only viable way to do accurate empirical mobile service research and demand‐side estimations in the kind of challenging cross‐service settings introduced in this paper.

The goal of this paper is to provide contributions aimed at illustrating how the autonomic computing concept may be applied within a multi‐path transport protocol called multi‐path TCP (MPTCP) with the aim of providing as high as possible a quality of service (QoS) for mobile and multimedia applications.

The paper's general vision is to define how to use the general IBM Autonomic framework for the design of a new and generic autonomous transport layer aimed at fitting as best as possible both QoS requirements and network constraints.

Several QoS‐aware mechanisms are proposed and evaluated and an ontology‐based semantic model for the dynamic discovery of MPTCP mechanisms is also presented. This work was done within the A2NETS project funded by the ITEA 2 program, a strategic pan‐European program for advanced pre‐competitive research and development (R&D). A2NETS aims at developing a set of common services for M2M devices communicating within heterogeneous networks.

The originality of this paper is the study of the QoS benefits induced by the implementation of the “partial reliability” concept in MPTCP for interactive video applications based on the codec H.264. The second contribution of the paper is that it deals with the decision process that has to be enforced to provide such an adaptable MPTCP with self‐autonomic capabilities. Towards this goal, a semantic ontology‐based model has been proposed allowing to classify and to define clearly the semantic of the different QoS‐oriented mechanisms that have been proposed for MPTCP. This ontology is aimed at being used by the autonomic manager during the decision process step.

Mobile devices used in educational settings are usually employed within a collaborative learning activity in which learning takes place in the form of social interactions between team members while performing a shared task. The authors aim to introduce MobiTOP (Mobile Tagging of Objects and People), a mobile annotation system that allows users to contribute and share geospatial multimedia annotations via mobile devices.

Field observations and interviews were conducted. A group of trainee teachers involved in a geography field study were instructed to identify rock formations by collaborating with each other using the MobiTOP system. The trainee teachers who were in the field were guided by their lab counterparts on the tasks required to identify the rock formations.

Participants were able to appreciate the fieldwork task as it augmented their classroom lessons. The system allowed them to communicate with one another in order to meet the objectives of the study. However, there were some technical difficulties in relation to the affordance of the mobile and web applications that affected the usefulness of the applications.

This study reports the design and implementation of a mobile annotation system that was evaluated in an actual classroom setting. The results of this work have implications for both mobile applications design and mobile learning.

To present a combination of Bluetooth handoff techniques and scatternet formation to adapt to varying topologies and traffic changes.

Through ad hoc networking with Bluetooth, devices could participate in multiple piconets, which form the scatternet. Although the details of scatternet implementation are not specified in the Bluetooth specification, much research has been carried out to propose different models of implementation. This paper presents a combination of the techniques of handoff and scatternet formation to adapt to varying topologies and traffic changes. Analysis of network performance is presented to confirm the feasibility of real implementation.

Provides a novel and practical design, compatible with Bluetooth specification, which is shown by experimental results to be an efficient design in providing a scatternet formation approach, while at the same time maintaining a low data error rate to support data and voice.

This paper presents Bluetooth handoff and scatternet formation techniques to extend geographical coverage and increase system capacity with adaptation to varying topologies and traffic changes. The techniques presented are compatible with Bluetooth specifications 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the development in the Finnish telecommunication market and trends in actual and future user behavior with regard to three groups of mobile services. It is the authors' view that service characteristics cannot be ignored.

The research is based on data collected over a period of three years using independent samples. To test the core of our conceptual model the study used structural equation modeling.

The analysis based on the data collected over three years shows that we cannot understand the actual and future use unless we take the subtleties and usability of services, i.e. the specific characteristics, and user values of the services involved, into account. The research clearly indicates that complementary services are dependent on positive attitudes towards mobile innovations and on perceived flexibility. Service composition is of critical importance to the success of 3G and beyond.

This paper is unique due to the fact that longitudinal data are presented concerning one of the most successful countries in Europe in terms of the adoption and use of advanced mobile services.

The capabilities of embedded devices such as smartphones are steadily increasing and provide the great flexibility of data access and collaboration while being mobile. From the distributed computing point of view, fundamental issues in mobile computing include heterogeneity in terms of varying device capabilities (i.e., operating systems and various hardware platforms), performance characteristics and real‐time behavior, and the ability to discover and interact with peers seamlessly. Web services are a family of XML based protocols to achieve interoperability among loosely coupled networked applications. We propose the use of Web services on embedded devices in order to solve interoperability issues in distributed mobile systems. We discuss various toolkits available for embedded devices and investigate performance characteristics of embedded Web services on smartphones. Our goal is to guide the design of Web services based applications on mobile devices, and provide estimates of performance that can be expected.

Coexistence of various wireless access networks and the ability of mobile terminals to switch between them make an optimal selection of serving networks for multicast groups a challenging problem. Since optimal network selection requires large dimensions of data to be collected from several network locations and sent between several network components, the scalability can easily become a bottleneck in large-scale systems. Therefore, reducing data exchange within heterogeneous wireless networks is important. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors study the decision-making process and the data that need to be sent between different network components. To analyze the operation of the wireless heterogeneous network, the authors built a mathematical model of the network. The objective is defined as a minimization of multicast streams in the system. To evaluate the heuristic solutions, the authors define the upper and lower bounds to their operation.

The proposed heuristic solutions substantially reduce the usage of bandwidth in mobile networks and exchange of information between the network components.

The authors proposed the approach that allows network selection in a decentralized manner with only limited information shared among the decision makers. The authors studied how different sets of information available to decision makers influenced the performance of the system. The work also investigates the usage of multiple paths for multicast in heterogeneous mobile environments.