Vertical Integration due to Software Systems' Modularity

In their product portfolio, OSS/BSS software vendors make products pre-integrated with each other as well as with other related OSS/BSS products. Prior to the full-scale development and integration, it is vital for these vendors to assess which products are reasonable to integrate. Such integration of software may be aimed at achieving different goals, such as: Reducing software integration efforts. Software vendors aim at maximizing their profits, whereas their customers (i.e., CSPs) aim at minimizing their costs by avoiding the integration job. As a result, to approach a win–win scenario, vendors provide already integrated products or subsystems (pre-integrated modules). Sharing similar k…

Modeling software integration scenarios for telecommunications operations software vendors

- Telecom operators deploy a vast number of software systems to support their operations. Vendors of these systems often integrate such software in their products in order to enable innovations, minimize the customer's integration efforts, etc. Different integration scenarios can be envisioned, and the issue of identifying more beneficial scenarios is of a great importance to the vendors. This paper focuses on analyzing different integration scenarios in the context of telecommunications operations software. For each scenario, the overall modularity of the set of software systems is evaluated, and the expected benefits of the scenario are modeled in terms of the modularity gain it provides.…

Towards enabling privacy preserving smart city apps

Smart city applications are increasingly relying on personally identifiable data. A disclosure of such a data to a platform provider and possible 3rd parties represents a risk to the privacy of the application users. To mitigate the privacy risk, two-layer privacy-preserving platform architecture is introduced, wherein the personally identifiable information is dealt with at the inner layer (executed in a trusted environment), whereas only generic and personally unidentifiable information is made available to the apps at the outer layer of the architecture — e.g., in a form of app-specific events. The essential requirements for the platform are described, and the architectural implications …

Specifying Patterns for Mobile Application Domain Using General Architectural Components

Software companies adopt patterns as a means to improve architecture and design practices. During recent years, the application of patterns has extended from general software applications to specific problem domains. In a new domain, suitable patterns fitting to the essential design problems in the new context need to be identified. In this paper, we introduce a general architectural model of mobile applications, which can be used to identify and organise essential patterns in mobile-application design process. This model is employed to construct a high-level architecture of a particular application. For each component of the architecture, the model may suggest candidate patterns that can b…

Internet-of-things market, value networks, and business models : state of the art report

Analysing software integration scenarios: the case of telecommunications operations software

Telecom operators deploy a vast number of software systems to support their operations. Vendors of this software often integrate in their products several software systems, in order to enable innovations, minimize customer's integration efforts, etc. Different integration scenarios can be envisioned, and the issue of identifying more beneficial scenarios is of a great importance to the vendors. This paper aims at analyzing different software integration scenarios from the viewpoint of their support for innovations, and focuses on the context of telecommunications operations software. For each scenario, the overall modularity of the set of software systems is evaluated, and the expected bene…

A Multi-Expert Based Approach to Continuous Authentication of Mobile-Device Users

Currently used in mobile devices PIN-based user authentication cannot provide a sufficient security level. Methods based on multi-modal user authentication involving biometrics (i.e. physical and behavioral characteristics of a person) may be employed to cope with this problem. However, dealing with physical characteristics only, these methods are either unable to provide continuous and user-friendly identity verification, or are resource consuming.

Cost benefits of flexible hybrid cloud storage : Mitigating volume variation with shorter acquisition cycle

The hybrid cloud storage is investigated as a case of concurrent sourcing.The paper introduces an analytical model for hybrid cloud storage costs.We study the role of acquisition cycle and volume variation in hybrid cloud costs.Shortening the reassessment interval reduces the volume non-stationarity.Shortening the reassessment interval reduces the total hybrid costs. Hybrid cloud storage combines cost-effective but inflexible private storage along with flexible but premium-priced public cloud storage. As a form of concurrent sourcing, it offers flexibility and cost benefits to organizations by allowing them to operate at a cost-optimal scale and scope under demand volume uncertainty. Howeve…

Detection of Fake Profiles in Social Media - Literature Review

Defining Complexity Factors for the Architecture Evaluation Framework

The design and implementation of telecommunication systems is an incremental and iterative process, and system architectures may need to be revised and refined several times during their lifetime. Formal evaluation facilitates the identification of the weak points, where improvements are due in these architectures. In the domain of telecommunications, such evaluation can be based on the Architecture Evaluation Framework (AEF). During the evaluation, a deep understanding of the processes within a system is needed. Meanwhile, the systems being designed are usually complex systems encompassing a large number of components with an intricate pattern of interaction between them. As a result, it i…

Comparing the cost-efficiency of CoAP and HTTP in Web of Things applications

Abstract Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) has been introduced as a simpler alternative to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for connecting constrained smart objects to the Web. The adoption of the protocol depends on its relative advantage, and the cost–benefit associated with the use of the protocol is a significant factor affecting a protocol adoption decision. This paper aims at deepening the understanding of the cost–benefits of CoAP and identifies the application scenarios where its use is likely to be economically justifiable. The paper analyzes the costs of using CoAP and HTTP in the Web of Things (WoT) applications, by identifying the components of the total cost of owne…

Applying Wavelet Packet Decomposition and One-Class Support Vector Machine on Vehicle Acceleration Traces for Road Anomaly Detection

Road condition monitoring through real-time intelligent systems has become more and more significant due to heavy road transportation. Road conditions can be roughly divided into normal and anomaly segments. The number of former should be much larger than the latter for a useable road. Based on the nature of road condition monitoring, anomaly detection is applied, especially for pothole detection in this study, using accelerometer data of a riding car. Accelerometer data were first labeled and segmented, after which features were extracted by wavelet packet decomposition. A classification model was built using one-class support vector machine. For the classifier, the data of some normal seg…

Assessing Cloud Infrastructure Costs in Communications-Intensive Applications

By deploying cloud infrastructure services, companies strive at achieving faster time to market, improved scalability, lower up-front costs, and lower IT management overhead, among other benefits. However, in longer term, the use of cloud infrastructure may incur significant costs; furthermore, these costs depend both on the required infrastructure resources and on the mode of infrastructure deployment. Therefore, the choice of a particular deployment mode should be justified with a systematic analysis of the associated costs. In this paper, a model for assessing the costs of alternative cloud infrastructure deployment scenarios is introduced. This model decomposes the infrastructure costs …

Costs of Using Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure: Towards a General Framework

Cloud computing infrastructure is a state-of-the-art computing as a utility paradigm, offering individuals and organizations instantly-available and scalable computing capacity. Organizations may deploy the cloud infrastructure in own data centers, as a private cloud, or use the public on-demand cloud infrastructure charged on a pay-per-use basis. The organizations may also adopt a hybrid solution, i.e. use public cloud capacity to complement the resources in the private cloud, e.g. during the periods of rapid growth in the demand. One of the important factors that affect the organizations’ decisions to adopt a hybrid cloud is the total cost of acquiring and managing the infrastructure. In …

Economic Aspects of Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure: User Organization Perspective

Adoption of cloud infrastructure promises enterprises numerous bene- ts, such as faster time-to-market and improved scalability enabled by on-demand provisioning of pooled and shared computing resources. In particular, hybrid clouds, by combining the private in-house capacity with the on-demand capacity of public clouds, promise to achieve both increased utilization rate of the in-house infrastructure and limited use of the more expensive public cloud, thereby lowering the total costs for a cloud user organization. In this paper, an analytical model of hybrid cloud costs is introduced, wherein the costs of computing and data communication are taken into account. Using this model, a cost-e c…

Software Business in the Telecommunications Sector

Operations and Business Support Systems (OSS/BSS) software of Communication Service Providers (CSP's) can be developed internally within the CSP or acquired from a Software Vendor. The software industry lifecycle model hypothesizes that software development is internal in the beginning of the industry's lifecycle, and that the share of external products increases when it matures. Empirical evidence shows signs of the OSS/BSS software industry approaching maturity. Current and future developments of the industry include the possibilities of utilizing the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model and Open Source software (OSSw). Both have gained increasing interest by the CSP's. However, the relativ…

Role of Acquisition Intervals in Private and Public Cloud Storage Costs

The volume of worldwide digital content has increased nine-fold within the last five years, and this immense growth is predicted to continue in the foreseeable future to reach 8 ZB by 2015. Traditionally, organizations proactively have built and managed their private storage facilities to cope with the growing demand for storage capacity. Recently, many organizations have instead welcomed the alternative of outsourcing their storage needs to the providers of public cloud storage services due to the proliferation of public cloud infrastructure offerings. The comparative cost-efficiency of these two alternatives depends on a number of factors, such as the prices of the public and private stor…

Real-time recognition of personal routes using instance-based learning

Predicting routes is a critical enabler for many new location-based applications and services, such as warning drivers about congestion- or accident-risky areas. Hybrid vehicles can also utilize the route prediction for optimizing their charging and discharging phases. In this paper, a new lightweight route recognition approach using instance-based learning is introduced. In this approach, the current route is compared in real-time against the route instances observed in past, and the most similar route is selected. In order to assess the similarity between the routes, a similarity measure based on the longest common subsequence (LCSS) is employed, and an algorithm for incrementally evaluat…

The Place and Role of Security Patterns in Software Development Process

Security is one of the key quality attributes for many contemporary software products. Designing, developing, and maintaining such software necessitates the use of a secure-software development process which specifies how achieving this quality goal can be supported throughout the development life-cycle. In addition to satisfying the explicitly-stated functional security requirements, such process is aimed at minimising the number of vulnerabilities in the design and the implementation of the software. The secure software development is a challenging task spanning various stages of the development process. This inherent difficulty may be to some extent alleviated by the use of the so-called…

Software-as-a-Service in the Telecommunication Industry: Problems and Opportunities

This paper examines the telecommunication software market and the adoption of topical Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model in this vertical market. The aim of this paper is to estimate which telecommunication software products are likely to be provided as a Service, and to examine the potential factors disallowing SaaS adoption. The set aim is pursued by studying both the supplying software vendors and the communication service providers (CSP) as customers. A set of thematic interviews, software industry statistics and information disclosed by the software vendors are used in the analysis. The results of the analysis reveal challenges in adopting SaaS for telecommunication software as well as…

Role of Data Communications in Hybrid Cloud Costs

Rapid adoption of cloud services in recent years has been driven by multiple factors, such as faster time-to-market and improved scalability enabled by public cloud infrastructure. Hybrid clouds, combining the in-house capacities with on-demand capacity of public clouds, achieve both the increased utilization rate of the in-house infrastructure and the limited use of more expensive public cloud, thereby lowering the total costs for the cloud user. In this paper, an analytical model of hybrid cloud costs is introduced, wherein the costs of computing and data communication are taken into account. Using this model, the costefficient division of the computing capacity between the private and th…

Advantages of Public Cloud Infrastructure in Different Technology Adoption Lifecycle Stages

Independent software vendors (ISV) utilize cloud infrastructure for different reasons. We hypothesize that the motivation to adopt cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) changes as the ISV’s product is getting adopted by the market. In this paper we consider how the infrastructure needs of ISVs change along the stages of ISV product’s adoption lifecycle, and analyze the potential benefits of utilizing IaaS in different stages. The analysis is illustrated with the cases of ISV firms with documented use of IaaS. These cases support the hypothesis that different benefits of IaaS are gaining importance along the adoption lifecycle.

An integrated identity verification system for mobile terminals

PurposeTo report the work on the design of an integrated identity verification system architecture aimed at approaching high verification accuracy, continuous security, and user‐friendliness.Design/methodology/approachThe reported research corresponds to the building process in the design science research paradigm. The requirements to an identity verification system are defined and used in the selection of architecture components. Furthermore, various issues affecting the suitability of component distribution between a terminal and a remote server are considered.FindingsIn order to meet the stated requirements, in the proposed architecture static and dynamic identity verification is combine…

A Generic Architectural Model Approach for Efficient Utilization of Patterns

A software pattern describes the core of the solution to a problem that tends to (re-)occur in a particular environment. Such patterns are commonly used as a means to facilitate the creation of an architectural design satisfying the desired quality goals. In this chapter, the practical challenges of efficient usage of patterns in domain-specific software development are presented. The specific domain considered here is the mobile domain, for which is given a sample collection of potentially useful patterns. After that, a novel generic architectural model approach for organizing patterns is presented. In this approach, the identification of relevant patterns is considered as the process of r…

Network Analysis of Platform Ecosystems: The Case of Internet of Things Ecosystem

Software platform providers are often seen as the cornerstone of their business ecosystem, where the other ecosystem players utilize the platform’s standardized components together with complementary components for making applications. These platforms are also becoming a cornerstone of the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) business ecosystem comprised of the companies who provide Internet-enabled devices, applications, connectivity solutions, and the platforms for the IoT usage. While a number of enabling technologies for IoT is available, the question remains what kind of ecosystem emerges around IoT platform providers and whether this ecosystem is evolving in line with the theoretical mod…

Masquerader detection in mobile context based on behaviour and environment monitoring

Mobiilipäätelaitteiden, matkapuhelimien ja kämmentietokoneiden yleistymisen myötä riski näiden laitteiden väärinkäytölle on kasvanut. Matkapuhelimia ja kämmentietokoneita varastetaan ja hukataan koko ajan. Tällöin on mahdollista laitteen päätyminen henkilölle, joka voi käyttää laitetta luvattomasti. Luvattoman käytön estämiseksi on syntynyt tarve turvajärjestelmälle, jonka avulla voidaan varmistaa, että mobiilipäätelaitetta käyttävällä henkilöllä on oikeus laitteen käyttöön.Mazhelis kehitti väitöskirjassaan menetelmää, jonka avulla mobiilipäätelaitteen laillinen käyttäjä erotetaan muista henkilöistä. Tähän pyritään käytön aikaista toimintaa ja toimintaympäristön informaatiota analysoimalla.…

A Techno-Economic Perspective of Constrained Application Protocol

Among billions of Internet enabled devices that are expected to surround us in the near future, many will be resource constrained, i.e., will have limited power supply, processing power and memory. To cope with these limitations, the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) has been recently introduced as a lightweight alternative to HTTP for connecting the resource limited devices to the Web. Although the new protocol offers solid technical advantages, it remains uncertain whether a successful uptake will follow, as it depends also on its economic feasibility for the involved stakeholders. Therefore, this paper studies the techno-economic feasibility of CoAP using a systematic methodologica…

Advantages of Public Cloud Infrastructure in Different Technology Adoption Lifecycle Stages

Independent software vendors (ISV) utilize cloud infrastructure for different reasons. We hypothesize that the motivation to adopt cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) changes as the ISV’s product is getting adopted by the market. In this paper we consider how the infrastructure needs of ISVs change along the stages of ISV product’s adoption lifecycle, and analyze the potential benefits of utilizing IaaS in different stages. The analysis is illustrated with the cases of ISV firms with documented use of IaaS. These cases support the hypothesis that different benefits of IaaS are gaining importance along the adoption lifecycle. peerReviewed

Vertical Software Industry Evolution: The Impact of Software Costs and Limited Customer Base

ContextSoftware systems are commonly used in a variety of industries as a means of automating organizational business processes. Initially, such software is often developed in-house by the vertical organizations possibly with the support of professional IT service providers; however, in many cases, internally developed software is eventually replaced with the software products provided by independent software vendors. These vendors often use license fees to recover their software development investments, as well as to gain some margin. However, if the vendor's customer base for a specific type of software is limited, then either the license fees are too high and hence the customers may pref…

Effect of Software on CSP Performance

In order to verify how (if at all) CSP's investments in software affect their business performance, the relationship between (i) CSP's spending on software and (ii) its key performance indicators (KPIs) is considered below. The investments in software are represented by internal, external, and total software spending a year or two years prior to the KPI values, while the KPIs include average revenue per user (ARPU), revenue, net income, EBIDTA, and change in revenue (as an indicator of company growth). Besides, Opex and Capex along with R&D expenses are used as control variables. We use the data collected for the years 2004–2007 (revenue, net income, EBITDA, market capitalization, R&D, CAPE…

Learning temporal patterns for anomaly intrusion detection

For the last decade an explosive spread of computer systems and computer networks has resulted in a society that is increasingly dependent on information stored on these systems. A computer system connected to the network is accessible from another computer in this network regardless of its geographical position. Along with providing many benefits for legitimate users this technology creates almost unlimited opportunities for malicious persons, which using software vulnerabilities may successfully penetrate the networked computer systems. In order to eliminate potential devastating consequences caused by breaches in computer systems, more and more attention is drawn to the information secur…

Impact of Storage Acquisition Intervals on the Cost-Efficiency of the Private vs. Public Storage

The volume of worldwide digital content has increased nine-fold within the last five years, and this immense growth is predicted to continue in foreseeable future reaching 8ZB already by 2015. Traditionally, in order to cope with the growing demand for storage capacity, organizations proactively built and managed their private storage facilities. Recently, with the proliferation of public cloud infrastructure offerings, many organizations, instead, welcomed the alternative of outsourcing their storage needs to the providers of public cloud storage services. The comparative cost-efficiency of these two alternatives depends on a number of factors, among which are e.g. the prices of the public…

Vertical Integration due to Small Market Size and High Product Development and Integration Costs

An independent software vendor (ISV) recovers the costs of software development and configuration through license fees. However, if the number of ISV's customers is limited, then either the license fees needed for recovering the software development investments may be too high (and hence the customer would prefer to develop the software internally), or the ISV's margin may have to be decreased. Given the costs of development and configuration, as well as the margins set by the ISVs, it is possible to estimate how many customers an ISV has to have in order to recover its costs. Furthermore, given a market of a specific size and the minimum number of ISV's customers, it is possible to assess …

An Initial Security Analysis of the Personal Transaction Protocol

Our society is becoming increasingly dependent on the rapid access and processing of information. The number of handheld mobile devices with access to the Internet and network-based software and services is exploding. Research indicates [1] that by the end of 2002 there will be over 1 billion mobile phone owners globally with Internet access, and that this number is going to grow exponentially in the nearest future. By 2006 the number of interconnected mobile device users is expected exceed the worldwide Internet subscriber population. It is estimated that in a few years there will be three times as many of these devices worldwide as personal computers.

Managerial Growth Challenges in Small Software Firms: A Multiple-Case Study of Growth-Oriented Enterprises

Notwithstanding the importance of small software firms, research focusing on understanding the growth challenges faced by their management is close to non-existent. By taking a life-cycle approach and focusing on managerial challenges, the aim of this paper is to analyze the growth process of small software firms. After forming a synthesis of possible growth challenges from relevant literature, the results are reflected upon case software firms using thematic interviews and questionnaires. According to the analysis of four software firms, managing human resources represents the greatest challenge for software services firms. Additionally, other challenges stem from competition and sales-rel…

Evaluating Classifiers for Mobile-Masquerader Detection

As a result of the impersonation of a user of a mobile terminal, sensitive information kept locally or accessible over the network can be abused. The means of masquerader detection are therefore needed to detect the cases of impersonation. In this paper, the problem of mobile-masquerader detection is considered as a problem of classifying the user behaviour as originating from the legitimate user or someone else. Different behavioural characteristics are analysed by designated one-class classifiers whose classifications are combined. The paper focuses on selecting the classifiers for mobile-masquerader detection. The selection process is conducted in two phases. First, the classification ac…

Defining Complexity Factors for Architecture Evaluation Framework

The design and implementation of telecommunication systems is an incremental and iterative process, and system architectures may need to be revised and refined several times during their lifetime. Formal evaluation facilitates the identification of the weak points, where improvements are due in these architectures. In the domain of telecommunications, such evaluation can be based on the Architecture Evaluation Framework (AEF). During the evaluation, a deep understanding of the processes within a system is needed. Meanwhile, the systems being designed are usually complex systems encompassing a large number of components with an intricate pattern of interaction between them. As a result, it i…

Estimating Accuracy of Mobile-Masquerader Detection Using Worst-Case and Best-Case Scenario

In order to resist an unauthorized use of the resources accessible through mobile terminals, masquerader detection means can be employed. In this paper, the problem of mobile-masquerader detection is approached as a classification problem, and the detection is performed by an ensemble of one-class classifiers. Each classifier compares a measure describing user behavior or environment with the profile accumulating the information about past behavior and environment. The accuracy of classification is empirically estimated by experimenting with a dataset describing the behavior and environment of two groups of mobile users, where the users within groups are affiliated with each other. It is as…

Characteristics and Measures for Mobile-Masquerader Detection

Personal mobile devices, as mobile phones, smartphones, and communicators can be easily lost or stolen. Due to the functional abilities of these devices, their use by an unintended person may result in a severe security incident concerning private or corporate data and services. Organizations develop their security policy and mobilize preventive techniques against unauthorized use. Current solutions, however, are still breakable and there still exists strong need for means to detect user substitution when it happens. A crucial issue in designing such means is to define what measures to monitor.

Cloud Services Pricing Models

A major condition for commercial success is a well-defined pricing strategy, however, cloud service providers face many challenges around pricing. Clearness and transparency in pricing is beneficial for all the actors in the ecosystem, where the currently existing abundance of different pricing models makes decision making difficult for service providers, partners, customers and competitors. In this paper, the SBIFT pricing model is evaluated and updated to cloud context. As a result, a 7-dimensional cloud pricing framework is proposed that helps clarifying the possible pricing models in order to let companies differentiate themselves from competitors by price. The framework can be used als…

Learning Temporal Regularities of User Behavior for Anomaly Detection

Fast expansion of inexpensive computers and computer networks has dramatically increased number of computer security incidents during last years. While quite many computer systems are still vulnerable to numerous attacks, intrusion detection has become vitally important as a response to constantly increasing number of threats. In this paper we discuss an approach to discover temporal and sequential regularities in user behavior. We present an algorithm that allows creating and maintaining user profiles relying not only on sequential information but taking into account temporal features, such as events' lengths and possible temporal relations between them. The constructed profiles represent …

A gap analysis of Internet-of-Things platforms

We are experiencing an abundance of Internet-of-Things (IoT) middleware solutions that provide connectivity for sensors and actuators to the Internet. To gain a widespread adoption, these middleware solutions, referred to as platforms, have to meet the expectations of different players in the IoT ecosystem, including device providers, application developers, and end-users, among others. In this article, we evaluate a representative sample of these platforms, both proprietary and open-source, on the basis of their ability to meet the expectations of different IoT users. The evaluation is thus more focused on how ready and usable these platforms are for IoT ecosystem players, rather than on t…

Market Polarization due to Difference in Interface Implementation Efforts

Another factor potentially affecting the evolution of the OSS/BSS software market is the high complexity of software interfaces. The software provided to a customer – a CSP – needs to be integrated with a number of heterogeneous subsystems deployed by the customer. If the number of integration interfaces is high, a vast amount of special knowledge is needed in the vendor organization. High integration efforts also take up the time of the compentent employees of the vendor organization, thereby reducing the number of customers which it is capable of serving. As a result, only few large vendors can compete in such market, and, due to a lack of competition, the evolution towards a horizontaliz…

A framework for evaluating Internet-of-Things platforms: Application provider viewpoint

Widespread adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) applications assumes a sustainable ecosystem of firms creating, distributing, and using these applications. Such an ecosystem often forms around a platform that implements commonly used functionality and offers it to the members of the ecosystem for creating applications and services. In IoT, such a platform may be materialized in a form of a cloud platform that supports the management of connected devices, and the development and use of the applications based on them. A number of cloud platforms targeting IoT applications are available in the market; to prosper, they need to assist the providers of the IoT applications in designing and develo…

A framework for behavior-based detection of user substitution in a mobile context

Personal mobile devices, such as mobile phones, smartphones, and communicators can be easily lost or stolen. Due to the functional abilities of these devices, their use by unintended persons may result in severe security breaches concerning private or corporate data and services. Organizations develop their security policy and employ preventive techniques to combat unauthorized use. Current solutions, however, are still breakable and there is a strong need for means to detect user substitution when it happens. A crucial issue in designing such means is to define the measures to be monitored. In this paper, a structured conceptual framework for mobile-user substitution detection is proposed.…

Defining an Internet-of-Things Ecosystem

By bringing the Internet connectivity to the things, the Internet-of-Things (IoT) promises a number of benefits to its customers, varying from faster and more accurate sensing of our environment, to more cost-efficient tracking of industrial processes. Likewise, from the business perspective, the wide adoption of IoT is expected to generate significant revenues to the providers of IoT application and services. The IoT adoption depends on whether the ecosystems of the companies focusing on IoT technologies would emerge and succeed in delivering to the market the solutions attractive to the customers. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to understand the essence and constituents of IoT ecos…

Adoption of Constrained Application Protocol

Among billions of Internet enabled devices that are expected to surround us in the near future, many will be resource constrained, i.e., will have limited power supply, processing power and memory. To cope with these limitations, the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) has been recently introduced as a lightweight alternative to HTTP for connecting the resource limited devices to the Web. Although the new protocol offers solid technical advantages, it remains uncertain whether a successful uptake will follow, as it depends also on its economic feasibility for the involved stakeholders. Therefore, this paper studies the techno-economic feasibility of CoAP using a systematic methodologica…

Costs of Using Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure: Towards a General Framework

Cloud computing infrastructure is a state-of-the-art computing as a utility paradigm, offering individuals and organizations instantly-available and scalable computing capacity. Organizations may deploy the cloud infrastructure in own data centers, as a private cloud, or use the public on-demand cloud infrastructure charged on a pay-per-use basis. The organizations may also adopt a hybrid solution, i.e. use public cloud capacity to complement the resources in the private cloud, e.g. during the periods of rapid growth in the demand. One of the important factors that affect the organizations’ decisions to adopt a hybrid cloud is the total cost of acquiring and managing the infrastructure. In …

Using recursive Bayesian estimation for matching GPS measurements to imperfect road network data

Map-matching refers to the process of projecting positioning measurements to a location on a digital road network map. It is an important element of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) focusing on driver assistance applications, on emergency and incident management, arterial and freeway management, and other applications. This paper addresses the problem of map-matching in the applications characterized by imperfect map quality and restricted computational resources - e.g. in the context of community-based ITS applications. Whereas a number of map-matching methods are available, often these methods rely on topological analysis, thereby making them sensitive to the map inaccuracies. In …

Efficient Utilization of Patterns in Mobile Application Development

Modelling Dependencies Between Classifiers in Mobile Masquerader Detection

The unauthorised use of mobile terminals may result in an abuse of sensitive information kept locally on the terminals or accessible over the network. Therefore, there is a need for security means capable of detecting the cases when the legitimate user of the terminal is substituted. The problem of user substitution detection is considered in the paper as a problem of classifying the behaviour of the person interacting with the terminal as originating from the user or someone else. Different aspects of behaviour are analysed by designated one-class classifiers whose classifications are subsequently combined. A modification of majority voting that takes into account some of the dependencies …

One-Class Classifiers : A Review and Analysis of Suitability in the Context of Mobile-Masquerader Detection

One-class classifiers employing for training only the data from one class are justified when the data from other classes is difficult to obtain. In particular, their use is justified in mobile-masquerader detection, where user characteristics are classified as belonging to the legitimate user class or to the impostor class, and where collecting the data originated from impostors is problematic. This paper systematically reviews various one-class classification methods, and analyses their suitability in the context of mobile-masquerader detection. For each classification method, its sensitivity to the errors in the training set, computational requirements, and other characteristics are consi…

Support for Knowledge and Innovations in Software Development – Community within Company: Inner Source Environment

This case study considers a software development support portal adapted from open source developer communities into a company internal, so called inner-source development environment. With theoretical insights into knowledge management (KM) models, recent advancements in KM theory building, and observations of the inner source platform we make observations as regarding the KM approach and suggestions for its further development. Both technological and human components of KM are considered. The results of this study, can be generally applicable to the knowledge creation and innovation support in software development. We believe that many software companies are following the example and build…

Retrieving Monitoring and Accounting Information from Constrained Devices in Internet-of-Things Applications

Part 6: Monitoring Mechanisms; International audience; Internet-of-Things (IoT) is envisioned to provide connectivity to a vast number of sensing or actuating devices with limited computational and communication capabilities. For the organizations that manage these constrained devices, the monitoring of each device’s operational status and performance level as well as the accounting of their resource usage are of great importance. However, monitoring and accounting support is lacking in today’s IoT platforms. Hence, this paper studies the applicability of the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), a lightweight transfer protocol under development by IETF, for efficiently retrieving monito…

Software Business in the Telecommunications Sector