Web technology underpins many interactive mobile applications. However, energy-efficient mobile web interactions is an outstanding challenge. Given the increasing diversity and complexity of mobile hardware, any practical optimization scheme must work for a wide range of users, mobile platforms and web workloads. This paper presents CAMEL , a novel energy optimization system for mobile web interactions. CAMEL leverages machine learning techniques to develop a smart, adaptive scheme to judiciously trade performance for reduced power consumption. Unlike prior work, C AMEL directly models how a given web content affects the user expectation and uses this to guide energy optimization. It goes further by employing transfer learning and conformal predictions to tune a previously learned model in the end-user environment and improve it over time. We apply CAMEL to Chromium and evaluate it on four distinct mobile systems involving 1,000 testing webpages and 30 users. Compared to four state-of-the-art web-event optimizers, CAMEL delivers 22% more energy savings, but with 49% fewer violations on the quality of user experience, and exhibits orders of magnitudes less overhead when targeting a new computing environment.
In this paper, we discuss the physical web projects based on network proximity for Smart Cities. In general, the Physical Web is an approach for connecting any physical object to the web. With this approach, we can navigate and control physical objects in the world surrounding mobile devices. Alternatively, we can execute services on mobile devices, depending on the surrounding physical objects. Technically, there are different ways to enumerate physical objects. In this paper, we will target the models based on the wireless proximity.
This paper is devoted to mobile cloud services in Smart City projects. As per mobile cloud computing paradigm, the data processing and storage are moved from the mobile device to a cloud. In the same time, Smart City services typically contain a set of applications with data sharing options. Most of the services in Smart Cities are actually mashups combined data from several sources. This means that access to all available data is vital to the services. And the mobile cloud is vital because the mobile terminals are one of the main sources for data gathering. In our work, we discuss criteria fo…
The growing popularity of smart mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets has made them an attractive target for cyber-criminals, resulting in a rapidly growing and evolving mobile threat as attackers experiment with new business models by targeting mobile users. With the emergence of the first large-scale mobile botnets, the core network has also become vulnerable to distributed denial-of-service attacks such as the signaling attack. Furthermore, complementary access methods such as Wi-Fi and femtocells introduce additional vulnerabilities for the mobile users as well as the core network…
As a consequence of the growing popularity of smart mobile devices, mobile malware is clearly on the rise, with attackers targeting valuable user information and exploiting vulnerabilities of the mobile ecosystems. With the emergence of large-scale mobile botnets, smartphones can also be used to launch attacks on mobile networks. The NEMESYS project will develop novel security technologies for seamless service provisioning in the smart mobile ecosystem, and improve mobile network security through better understanding of the threat landscape. NEMESYS will gather and analyze information about th…
We propose a new way to share licensed spectrum bandwidth capacity in mobile networks between operators, service providers and consumers using blockchain-based smart contracts. We discuss the foundational building blocks in the contract as well as various extensions to support more advanced features such as bulk purchases, future reservations, and various auction mechanisms. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the system can be implemented with an open-source, permissioned Enterprise blockchain, Hyperledger Sawtooth. We show that our smart contract implementation can improve blockchain transaction…
We expose a new security leak for smartphone users, which allows to stole user personal data by accessing the mobile operator user page when auto-login is employed. We show how any "apparently" genuine app can steal these data from some mobile operators, affecting more than 80% of Italian mobile smartphones.
With prosperity of applications on smartphones, energy saving for smartphones has drawn increasing attention. In this paper we devise Phone2Cloud, a computation offloading-based system for energy saving on smartphones in the context of mobile cloud computing. Phone2Cloud offloads computation of an application running on smartphones to the cloud. The objective is to improve energy efficiency of smartphones and at the same time, enhance the application's performance through reducing its execution time. In this way, the user's experience can be improved. We implement the prototype of Phone2Cloud …
The popularity and applicability of mobile crowdsensing applications are continuously increasing due to the widespread of mobile devices and their sensing and processing capabilities. However, we need to offer appropriate incentives to the mobile users who contribute their resources and preserve their privacy. Blockchain technologies enable semi-anonymous multi-party interactions and can be utilized in crowdsensing applications to maintain the privacy of the mobile users while ensuring first-rate crowdsensed data. In this work, we propose to use blockchain technologies and smart contracts to o…
This article is focused on mobile development using Visual Studio 2005, web services and their connection to Oracle server, willing to help programmers to realize simple and useful mobile applications.
Web Services and mobile data services are the newest trends in information systems engineering in wired and wireless domains, respectively. Web Services have a broad range of service distributions while mobile phones have large and expanding user base. To address the confluence of Web Services and pervasive mobile devices and communication environments, a basic mobile Web Service provider was developed for smart phones. The performance of this Mobile Host was also analyzed in detail. Further analysis of the Mobile Host to provide proper QoS and to check Mobile Host's feasibility in the P2P net…
Mobile data services in combination with profluent web services are seemingly the path breaking domain in current information research. Effectively, these mobile web services will pave the way for exciting performance and security challenges, the core need-to-be-addressed issues. On security front, though a lot of standardized security specifications and implementations exist for web services in the wired networks, not much has been analysed and standardized in the wireless environments. This paper addresses some of the critical challenges in providing security to the mobile web service domain…
With the rapid development of new and innovative applications for mobile devices like smartphones, advances in battery technology have not kept pace with rapidly growing energy demands. Thus energy consumption has become a more and more important issue of mobile devices. To meet the requirements of saving energy, it is critical to monitor and analyze the energy consumption of applications on smartphones. For this purpose, we develop a smart energy monitoring system called SEMO for smartphones using Android operating system. It can profile mobile applications with battery usage information, whi…
With mobiles overtaking desktops as the primary vehicle of Internet consumption, mobile web performance has become a crucial factor for websites as it directly impacts their revenue. In principle, improving web performance entails squeezing out every millisecond of the webpage delivery, loading, and rendering. However, on a practical note, an illusion of faster websites suffices. This paper presents DriveShaft, a system envisioned to be deployed in Content Delivery Networks, which improves the perceived web performance on mobile devices by reducing the time taken to show visually complete web …
It is now feasible to host Web Services on a mobile device due to the advances in cellular devices and mobile communication technologies. However, the reliability, usability and responsiveness of the Mobile Hosts depend on various factors including the characteristics of available network, computational resources, and better means of searching the services provided by them. P2P enhances the adoption of Mobile Host in commercial environments. Mobile Hosts in P2P can collaboratively share the resources of individual peers. P2P also enhances the service discovery of huge number of Web Services po…
The web has become a ubiquitous application development platform for mobile systems. Yet, web access on mobile devices remains an energy-hungry activity. Prior work in the field mainly focuses on the initial page loading stage, but fails to exploit the opportunities for energy-efficiency optimization while the user is interacting with a loaded page. This paper presents a novel approach for performing energy optimization for interactive mobile web browsing. At the heart of our approach is a set of machine learning models, which estimate \emph{at runtime} the frames per second for a given user i…
Service composition enables customizable services to be provided to the service consumers. Since the capabilities and the performances of mobile devices (e.g., smart phone, PDA, handheld media player) have improved, a mobile device can be utilized to interact with external mobile service providers towards providing composite Web service to remote clients. Existing approaches on mobile-hosted service composition are usually platform dependent, and rely on centralized infrastructure. Such approaches are not feasible in an open, mobile infrastructure-less environment, in which networked services …
Although almost all information about Smart Contract addresses is shared via websites, emails, or other forms of digital communication, Blockchains and distributed ledger technology are unable to establish secure bindings between websites and corresponding Smart Contracts. For a user, it is impossible to differentiate whether a website links to a legitimate Smart Contract set up by owners of a business or to an illicit contract aiming to steal users' funds. Surprisingly, current attempts to solve this issue mostly comprise of information redundancy, e.g., displaying contract addresses multiple…
With the popularity of mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets, users prefer visiting Web pages on mobile devices. Meanwhile, HTTP(S) plays as the major protocol to deliver Web contents, and has served the Web well for more than 15 years. However, as the Web pages grow increasingly complex to provide more content and functionality, the shortcomings and inflexibility of HTTP become more and more urgent to solve, e.g., the sluggish page load, insecure content, redundant transfer, etc. SPDY and HTTP/2 are promoted to solve the shortcomings and inflexibilities of HTTP/1.x. We are interested i…
A variety of mobile devices and applications have spread the usability of blockchain solutions to over 5.27 billion unique mobile phone users. The rising of Bitcoin price up to USD 50,000 in March 2021 has made many blockchain mobile wallets and smart contracts DApps popular for current and future investment of cryptocurrency and digital-asset managements. To understand the trend, this chapter will present the design and implementation of mobile blockchain DApps using Android Studio together with Ethereum smart contract as the digital-asset management tool. Java Android and Ethereum Web3-Java …
It is now feasible to host basic web services on a smart phone due to the advances in wireless devices and mobile communication technologies. While the applications are quite welcoming, the ability to provide secure and reliable communication in the vulnerable and volatile mobile ad-hoc topologies is vastly becoming necessary. The paper mainly addresses the details and issues in providing secured communication and access control for the mobile web service provisioning domain. While the basic message-level security can be provided, providing proper access control mechanisms for the Mobile Host …
By year 2020, the number of smartphone users globally will reach 3 Billion and the mobile data traffic (cellular + WiFi) will exceed PC Internet traffic the first time. As the number of smartphone users and the amount of data transferred per smartphone grow exponentially, limited battery power is becoming an increasingly critical problem for mobile devices which heavily depend on network I/O. Despite the growing body of research in power management techniques for the mobile devices at the hardware layer as well as the lower layers of the networking stack, there has been little work focusing on…
A smart home connects tens of home devices to the Internet, where an IoT cloud runs various home automation applications. While bringing unprecedented convenience and accessibility, it also introduces various security hazards to users. Prior research studied smart home security from several aspects. However, we found that the complexity of the interactions among the participating entities (i.e., devices, IoT clouds, and mobile apps) has not yet been systematically investigated. In this work, we conducted an in-depth analysis of five widely-used smart home platforms. Combining firmware analysis…
It is now feasible to host basic web services on a smart phone due to the advances in wireless devices and mobile communication technologies. The market capture of mobile web services also has increased significantly, in the past years. While the applications are quite welcoming, the ability to provide secure and reliable communication in the vulnerable and volatile mobile ad-hoc topologies is vastly becoming necessary. Even though a lot of standardized security specifications like WS-Security, SAML exist for web services in the wired networks, not much has been analyzed and standardized in th…
The quality of experience with the mobile web remains poor, partially as a result of complex websites and design choices that worsen performance, particularly for users in suboptimal networks or devices. Prior proposed solutions have seen limited adoption due in part to the demand they place on developers and content providers, and the performing infrastructure needed to support them. We argue that Document and Permissions Policies -- an ongoing effort to enforce good practices on web design -- may offer the basis for a readily-available and easily-adoptable solution. In this paper, we evaluat…
The adoption of smart / adaptive antenna techniques in future wireless systems is expected to have a significant impact on the efficient use of the spectrum, the minimization of the cost of establishing new wireless networks, the optimization of service quality and realization of transparent operation across multi technology wireless networks [1]. This paper presents brief account on smart antenna (SA) system. SAs can place nulls in the direction of interferers via adaptive updating of weights linked to each antenna element. SAs thus cancel out most of the co-channel interference resulting in …
This work presents an innovative, multidisciplinary and cost-effective ecosystem of ICT solutions able to collect, process and distribute geo-referenced information about the influence of pollution and micro-climatic conditions on the quality of life in Smart Cities. The system has been developed and experimentally evaluated in the framework of the research project SHE, co-funded by the Tuscany Region (Italy). Specifically, an innovative monitoring network has been developed, constituted by fixed and mobile sensor nodes, which provided comparable measurements in stationary and mobile condition…
In mobile network, a complaint hotspot problem often affects even thousands of users' service and leads to significant economic losses and bulk complaints. In this paper, we propose an approach to predict a customer complaint based on real-time user signalling data. Through analyzing the network and user sevice procedure, 30 key data fields related to user experience have been extracted in XDR data collected from the S1 interface. Furthermore, we augment these basic features with derived features for user experience evaluation, such as one-hot features, statistical features and differential fe…
By year 2020, the number of smartphone users globally will reach 3 Billion and the mobile data traffic (cellular + WiFi) will exceed PC internet traffic the first time. As the number of smartphone users and the amount of data transferred per smartphone grow exponentially, limited battery power is becoming an increasingly critical problem for mobile devices which increasingly depend on network I/O. Despite the growing body of research in power management techniques for the mobile devices at the hardware layer as well as the lower layers of the networking stack, there has been little work focusi…
We investigate a type of emerging user-assisted mobile applications or services, referred to as Dynamic Mobile Ad-hoc Crowd Service (DMACS), such as collaborative streaming via smartphones or location privacy protection through a crowd of smartphone users. Such services are provided and consumed by users carrying smart mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) who are in close proximity of each other (e.g., within Bluetooth range). Users in a DMACS system dynamically arrive and depart over time, and are divided into multiple possibly overlapping groups according to radio range constraints. Crucial to…
The advanced features of today's smart phones and hand held devices, like the increased memory and processing capabilities, allowed them to act even as information providers. Thus a smart phone hosting web services is not a fancy anymore. But the relevant discovery of these services provided by the smart phones has became quite complex, because of the volume of services possible with each Mobile Host providing some services. Centralized registries have severe drawbacks in such a scenario and alternate means of service discovery are to be addressed. P2P domain with it resource sharing capabilit…
Mobile devices that connect to the Internet via cellular networks are rapidly becoming the primary medium for accessing Web content. Cellular service providers (CSPs) commonly deploy Web proxies and other middleboxes for security, performance optimization and traffic engineering reasons. However, the prevalence and policies of these Web proxies are generally opaque to users and difficult to measure without privileged access to devices and servers. In this paper, we present a methodology to detect the presence of Web proxies without requiring access to low-level packet traces on a device, nor a…
We present PCach, a smartphone-based approach for relieving the congestion in cellular network resulting from the exponential growth in mobile data traffic. The basic idea underlying PCach is simple: use WiFi to proactively cache content on the smartphone's memory, which otherwise would have been delivered through the cellular network. However, it leads to several challenging questions, including how much mobile data actually flows through cellular networks, how much data can be pre-cached, and when and what to pre-cache. We address these questions progressively using a thorough analysis of us…
With an enormous range of applications, Internet of Things (IoT) has magnetized industries and academicians from everywhere. IoT facilitates operations through ubiquitous connectivity by providing Internet access to all the devices with computing capabilities. With the evolution of wireless infrastructure, the focus from simple IoT has been shifted to smart, connected and mobile IoT (M-IoT) devices and platforms, which can enable low-complexity, low-cost and efficient computing through sensors, machines, and even crowdsourcing. All these devices can be grouped under a common term of M-IoT. Eve…