Editorial

Citation

Khalil, I. (2013), "Editorial", International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, Vol. 9 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijpcc.2013.36109baa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, Volume 9, Issue 2

Four papers have been carefully selected for this issue of the International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communication. The first paper “A scheduling method for heterogeneous clients on media data broadcasting” proposes a scheduling method called hierarchical asynchronous harmonic broadcasting (H-AHB) to reduce the waiting time for media data broadcasting. The novelty of the proposed method lies in the reduction of the waiting time for heterogeneous clients’ environments. The method uses the client’s available bandwidth effectively to divide the server bandwidth into several channels taking into account the assumed client bandwidth and to broadcast the divided data using several channels. The performance evaluation of the method proves that H-AHB gives shorter waiting time than conventional methods since the channel bandwidth is determined so that clients can receive data from all channels that they can receive.

The second paper in the issue “Design of energy-efficient location-based cloud services using cheap sensors” studies the feasibility of finding the traversed routes by matching altitude data with stored route information in a crowd-sourced database.

The authors proposed a concept of using crowd-sourced route data to track the movement of mobile devices with altitude sensors and studied the feasibility and accuracy of this approach by analysing the characteristics of a number of stored routes and derive values for estimation parameters with that data. In addition to matching full routes we analyse the matching of partial routes and of routes consisting of multiple sub-routes. An extensive measurement study was conducted with traces collected via walking, biking and riding a bus in different geographical areas showing how the speed of movement, means of transportation, and route traversal direction influences the matching accuracy. This approach can be used to save battery on a GPS enabled smart phone by allowing GPS to be switched off when the user is following a route found from the crowd-sourced database.

While several approaches have been proposed in the literature to deal with the energy management at the level of hardware, there is an initial movement to extend this research to the software engineering area. The third paper in this issue “The hardware and software aspects of energy consumption in the mobile development platform” provides a broad analysis about the different research directions in energy consumption optimisation and stresses the important contributions that the software engineering area could offer to this subject. The authors introduce first the issues of energy management from the hardware perspective and then move to show how the energy is generally used by the modules that compose the mobile architecture focusing on the energy management, from a software perspective, The evaluation environment and the scenarios that characterise the energy profile of mobile devices can be used to better qualify future generations of mobile devices.

The last paper “An intelligent data fusion technique based on the particle filter to perform precise outdoor localization” proposes a dynamic base station exclusion technique for outdoor localization. The approach proposed by this paper excludes noisy base stations to provide more accurate locations estimation. The authors also propose a data fusion technique based on the particle filter. This technique fuses phase shifts from signals received from nearby base stations with data obtained from the inertial navigation subsystem (INS). The results showed that this data fusion technique results in significant location accuracy when having only few number of low power AM radio base stations. A mathematical location error analysis model was also provided to verify the correctness of the outdoor localization technique.

May 2013.

Ismail KhalilEditor-in-Chief