Earticle

In the current life, the Internet is playing a key role in transferring diverse information. As the performance of the Internet has been growing, transferred information has the form of multimedia streams such as video and audio. However, in current computing and internet environment, multimedia streaming service can't be accomplished smoothly due to the various factors such as internet bandwidth, computing power and so on. In this paper, we are proposing an efficient system, called SMART (Server for Multimedia Applications for Residence community) including hardware and software in terms of the design concept and system architecture for the multimedia streaming service. We also present the implementation result for the system.

Unmanned vehicle driving systems are getting interesting for the auto mobile industry. One of the key issues in the unmanned vehicle driving system is how to acquire the current position of the vehicle. In general, it can be achieved by Global Positioning System (GPS). However, if the unmanned vehicle will be parked in the parking garage by itself, GPS can not provide sufficient information to avoid collisions and the accuracy of GPS is not enough for the narrow parking space. An automatic vehicle parking system is proposed in the paper, where wireless sensor networks and infrared technologies are adopted simultaneously to enhance the accuracy of positioning. The prototype of the proposed automatic vehicle parking system is also implemented.

Owing to the progress of wired and wireless home networking, sensor networks, networked appliances, mechanical and control engineering and computers themselves, we can realize smart homes nowadays and many smart home projects are proceeding in the world What we have to be careful is not to repeat the same thing as the home automation technologies that were booming in 1970’s. That is to say, automation should not become a goal of the smart home technologies. In this paper, a real-life test bed, called the ”Ubiquitous Home,” is presented. In the Ubiquitous Home, a robot plays a role of interface for the residents. Three kinds of context-aware services have been implemented and a real-life living experiment was conducted. The experimental results are reported.

Common information can be sent to multiple users with Broadcast/Multicast services. In smart home, multimedia services can be provided to users, who want to receive multimedia data through mobile phones. Most of multimedia applications are implemented using the streaming technique from contents provider to subscribers. It is important to manage the buffering amount remained in the user side in order to support the adequate quality of video contents and minimize complaints of subscribers due to buffer starvation. In the wireless environment, it is difficult to provide several subscribers with multicast traffic stably, since the data rate which users can receive varies according to the channel state of each user. Therefore, we propose and discuss an efficient usage together with MIU (Multicast In Unicast portion) as well as MIM (Multicast In Multicast portion) in order to maximize the aggregate throughput of users and minimize the starvation duration degrading QoS supported to users. We consider the multicast partitioning problem applying list partitioning algorithm and provide the analytical foundation that the proposed scheme can be evaluated. Simulation results show that proposed model can provide enhanced performance and allowed streaming quality.

We propose a position detection mechanism enabling location-aware Pin&Play. Though the positions of inserted pins are important for most applications, it could not be detected in previous systems. The proposed method detects the positions of pins by processing images taken with a camera placed in front of the board. The proposed method has an error estimation mechanism to avoid the accumulation of position error. We also clarify the effectiveness of our proposed method through performance evaluations.

The wireless sensor network (WSN), is a type of self-organized distribution system without complex infrastructure requirement. However, WSN’s independence and un-attended usage limit its power supply and life expectancy. These become a critical issue for any WSN implementation. The in-network processing which, intends to minify data volume locally can greatly reduce the energy consumption of data delivery over a long distance to the sink. However, open problems are still remain with in-network processing, such as how to carry out in-network processing, and how to combine routing scheme to the sink (e.g. the long distance delivery). For any WSN application, the following pre-assumption is vital. There exists a physical signal field which bridges physical events to the sensors of WSN, otherwise WSN does not work. In fact, the physical signal field can be depicted by sensory data of all the nodes, and can even be used for local data convergence (e.g. in-network processing). An immediate solution which we propose is that, sensory data of the nodes can be converged to local extremes of the physical signal field along its gradient direction. Furthermore, the physical signal field is integrated with the cost field routing scheme. The cost field routing is in charge of delivering data to the sink. During the in-network processing, the delivery direction is derived by combining linearly the gradient directions of the cost field and physical signal field. Also simulation results show that the proposed schemes are robust, adaptable, and reliable to the variation of physical events.

With the advent of pervasive computing environments, the issue related to context-aware middleware is an emerging area of research. We propose proactive services on the basis of CAMUS (Context-Aware Middleware for URC Systems). First, this paper presents the system architecture of CAMUS. CAMUS is a middleware for providing context-aware applications with development and execution methodology. Accordingly, the applications developed by CAMUS respond in a timely fashion to contexts. Secondly, this paper illustrates the contents recommendation and control service agents with the property, operation, and task for the context-aware active services. Next, proposed active services are applied to the pervasive home environment for evaluation of our system. To do this, we implement the TV contents recommendation service agent, control service agent and context-aware task using CAMUS. And we evaluate the performance of Planet communication model of CAMUS.

Although there exist many middlewares such as Havi, Jini, LonWorks, UPnP, and SLP, new middlewares specialized for diverse information appliances are expected to appear continuously as home networks evolve. In this paper, we first investigate an integrated architecture for supporting interoperability among heterogeneous middlewares on home networks. We then propose and implement a user-oriented integrated architecture based on standard methods for efficient home network. HOMI(HOmenetwork Middleware for Interoperability) architecture proposed in this paper provides an interface for identifying and utilizing services among heterogeneous devices using standard methods in order to support interoperability among heterogeneous middlewares. Non-standard methods provide interfaces that allows users to build and/or modify interoperable service scenarios using a script language called HOMIL(HOMI Language). Different from existing integrated middleware architectures, HOMI allows users to build and organize their scenarios through the interfaces. By allowing heterogeneous devices to control each other or to transfer data to others using standard methods, HOMI improves efficiency and convenience of interoperation between heterogeneous appliances for home network. Applying modified scenarios immediately to a home network environment, HOMI provides users with seamless services without installing new applications, updating the server, or rebooting in order to install new scenarios. Lastly, the overhead occurred in a centralized and integrated middleware architecture can be reduced by distributing agents into multiple devices.

ReferencesUser should monitor the home network environment periodically so to maintain his optimal conditions. User should also collect the information about the environments of electronic devices within home network, analyze them through learning algorithm and seize the disposition of user under the collected information. In addition, after seizing the disposition of user, home network should be controlled to provide optimal environment to user through continuous monitoring. And more enhanced services that can analyze users' pattern of behaviors and reflect individual tendency in the service should be offered so that users can obtain the information they want much faster. Thus, an intellectual control model will be discussed herein, which can offer active service based on a pattern of users' behaviors, in order to suggest a device that predicts users' activities and operates in a more intelligent way.