Advances in ubiquitous sensing, computing and wireless communication technologies are leading to the development of cyber-physical systems (CPS), which promise to revolutionize the way we interact with the physical world. CPS applications, such as healthcare monitoring, may involve many users and objects scattered over a wide area. One critical function of CPS is object search in the physical world through the cyber sphere that enables interaction between the cyber and physical spheres. Some of the previously proposed physical object search engines use RFID tracking, and others collect the information of object locations into a hierarchical centralized server. The difficulty of widely deploying RFID devices, the centralized search, and the need for periodical location information collection prevent CPS from achieving higher scalability and efficiency. To deal with this problem, we propose a Social-aware distributed Cyber-Physical human-centric Search engine (SCPS) that leverages the social network formed by wireless device users for object search. Without requiring periodical location information collection, SCPS locates objects held by users based on the routine user movement pattern. Moreover, using a social-aware Bayesian network, it can accurately predict the users’ locations even at the occurrence of exceptional (i.e., non-routine) events (e.g., raining) that break user movement pattern. Thus, SCPS is more advantageous than all previous social network based works which assume that user behaviors always follow a certain pattern. Further, SCPS conducts the search in a fully distributed manner by relying on a distributed hash table (DHT) structure. As a result, SCPS achieves high scalability, efficiency and location accuracy. Extensive real-trace driven simulation results show the superior performance of SCPS compared to other representative search methods including a hierarchical centralized method, a decentralized method, and two social network based methods. The results also show the effectiveness of different components of SCPS.

One critical function of cyber-physical systems (CPS) is object search in the physical world through the cyber sphere that enables interaction between the cyber and physical spheres. Some of the previously proposed physical object search engines use RFID tracking, and others collect the information of object locations into a hierarchical centralized server. The difficulty of widely deploying RFID devices, the centralized search, and the need for periodical location information collection prevent CPS from achieving higher scalability and efficiency. To deal with this problem, we propose a Social-aware distributed Cyber-Physical human-centric Search engine (SCPS) that leverages the social network formed by wireless device users for object search. Without requiring periodical location information collection, SCPS locates objects held by users based on the routine user movement pattern. Moreover, using a social-aware Bayesian network, it can accurately predict the users' locations when exceptional events (e.g., inclement weather) occur, which breaks user movement pattern. Thus, SCPS is more advantageous than all previous social network based works which assume that user behaviors always follow a certain pattern. Further, SCPS conducts the search in a fully distributed manner by relying on a DHT structure. As a result, SCPS achieves high scalability, efficiency and location accuracy. Extensive real-trace driven simulation results show the superior performance of SCPS compared to other representative search methods.

Mobile application service providers are trying to strike a balance between offering personalized services and safeguarding user privacy. Being able to offer targeted and relevant services requires access to sensitive user information, such as health records, financial transactions, preferences, and location. Users, on the other hand, are reluctant to allow access to their sensitive information when no mechanisms are in place to ensure the proper usage of this information. In this paper, we describe TASER, a trusted gateway between service providers and sensitive information owners. TASER ensures that only authorized and reputable service providers are given access to sensitive information required by their services for users that have opted-in to such services.

The OSGitrade service platform is universal middleware for Java-based platforms that provides capabilities for enabling service providers to deploy consumer applications and services via various business models. This paper describes motivation and requirements for a service aggregation business model and describes how OSGi technology supports it.

In this paper we enhance the Digital Content Mediator (DCM) approach, a legitimate online service that uses financial incentives as an effective weapon to fight against online piracy. We provide needed network security support for the DCM service. The DCM mediator is a trusted notary to ensure fair and legitimate deals between digital content selling peers and buying peers. (1) In our design, the mediator sees no raw bits of digital contents. This saves storage and communication resource for the central mediator. (2) For the seller and buyer in a DCM-legitimized transaction, one wants payment and the other wants the content. The DCM protocol ensures that neither of them can stop the protocol in the middle to steal its service without serving the other party. (3) A digital content may have many legitimate copies from large amount of sellers. In a large-scale random network like the Internet, transaction fairness is defined as the condition that a buyer wants to buy the copy from the seller with shortest downloading delay (i.e., largest seller-to-buyer pairwise bandwidth) given the same amount of financial charge. DCM employs flow network security countermeasures to ensure that a seller keeps its bandwidth promises. Our experiments on the Internet confirm the effectiveness of our design.

IP-based, value-added services have great potential to create value for consumers and generate additional revenue streams for service providers. Telcordia's adaptive communicating applications platform (ACAP) is a system designed to provide a uniform and integrated service development platform for developing and deploying value-added services. The OSGi/spl reg/ alliance is an industry wide consortium that defined a standard platform that provides lifecycle management services for value-added services. Great synergy exists between ACAP and the OSGi service platform, as ACAP provides support for the service management issues not addressed by OSGi technology, and vice versa. In this paper, we argue for integration of ACAP and the OSGi service platform in order to provide better overall service management. We present a lightweight, cost-effective integration approach.

ASPs (application service providers) today provide a means for businesses to outsource their applications thus saving on setup and maintenance costs. This paper presents an example of an ASP providing a service to a specialized networked device: a networked alarm clock. This example is used to illustrate the issues ASPs would need to deal with to provide services to specialized networked devices within a home network.

This document proposes the use of session initiation protocol (SIP) for network-capable appliances. It leverages standard SIP capabilities to directly communicate with appliances even when they are behind firewalls, network address translators (NATs) or other entities that prevent direct end-to-end communication. When combined with the recently proposed instant messaging and presence SIP extensions these techniques become even more powerful to allow the secure and reliable access to appliances in a variety of different networked environments.