Ubiquitous computing and communication are the key technology for achieving economic growth, sustainable development, safe and secure community towards a ubiquitous network society. Although the technology alone cannot solve the emerging problems, it is important to deploy services everywhere and reach real people with sensor enabled smart phones or devices. Using these devices and wireless sensor networks, we have been creating various types of ubiquitous services which support our everyday life. In this paper, we describe ubiquitous services based on a HOT-SPA model and discuss challenges in creating new ubiquitous services with smart enablers such as smart phones, wireless sensor nodes, social media, and cloud services. We first classify various types of ubiquitous service and introduce the HOT-SPA model which is aimed at modeling ubiquitous services. Several ubiquitous services, such as DIY smart object services, Twitthings, Airy Notes, and SensingCloud, are described. We then address the challenges in creating advanced ubiquitous services by enhancing coupling between a cyber and a physical space.

Increasing hardware resources, such as multi-core and multi-socket CPUs, memory capacity and high-speed NICs, impose significant challenges on Network Function Virtualization (NFV) backends. They increase the potential numbers of per-server NFs or tenants, which requires a packet switching architecture that is not only scalable to large number of virtual ports, but also robust to attacks on the data plane. This is a real problem; a recent study has reported that Open vSwitch, a widely used software switch, had a buffer-overflow bug in its data plane that results the entire SDN domain to be hijacked by worms propagated in the network. In order to address this problem, we propose REdge. It scales to thousands of virtual ports or NFs (as opposed to hundreds in the current state-of-the art), and protect modular, flexible packet switching logic against various bugs, such as buffer overflow and other unexpected operations using static program checking. When 2048 NFs are active and packets are distributed to them based on the MAC or IP addresses, REdge achieves 3.16 Mpps or higher packet forwarding rates for 60 byte packets and achieves the wire rate for 1500 byte packets in the 25 Gbps link.

We have been investigating a new class of ubiquitous services, called Activity Logging, which takes advantage for private and public sensors and the RFID tags on real-world objects. The purpose of Activity Logging is to digitally record users' interests with real-world objects and users' context to describe the users' activity. Such digital information acquired from a range of sensors and tags, if being accumulated, forms a great data source for users to recall their activities later or to share the activities with others. This paper explores the design space to realize Activity Logging, and proposes a simple mobile device called Activity Recorder that marries public and private sensors to provide a powerful Activity Logging service. An Activity Recorder contains a range of private sensors, and has communication capability to work with public sensors around the user.

Many handover techniques in the Internet have been introduced with the development of mobile computing technologies. Although many proposed handover schemes utilize multiple wireless interfaces, having multiple wireless interfaces in a mobile device increases its power consumption, device installation space, and hardware costs. We have been studying handover schemes for mobile nodes with a single wireless interface. To achieve seamless and efficient handover, we focus on Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) that offers a message-oriented, reliable and connection-oriented delivery transport service. Unlike other transport protocols like TCP, SCTP can provide an end-to-end handover mechanism with multi-homing feature. However, the handover mechanism in the current SCTP causes large handover latency particularly when a mobile node has only one single wireless interface. This paper investigates the current issues of the SCTP handover mechanism, and proposes a new efficient handover scheme based on SCTP, which identifies a communication path as a pair of source and destination address. Additionally, we modified SCTP behavior when an SCTP endpoint received a SET PRIMARY message to change primary destination of peer endpoint. This paper shows that our scheme can reduce the handover latency by two to thirty seconds.

In forthcoming home network environment, computation capability will be embedded invisibly in home appliances, sensors, walls, ceilings, and floors. People will conduct various tasks using multiple devices simultaneously without consciousness of using computers. In this paper, first, we propose an application model named Virtual Network Appliance (VNA) model which simplify and expand device utilization. In the model, each device has VNA runtime system and function objects, called VNA components, running on it. A user task is defined in an application called VNA which is a logical appliance consisting of abstract function requirements and a message graph among them. Second, we propose Virtual Plug&Play mechanism which is a dynamic service integration mechanism in VNA model implementation. When a user conducts a task, he/she makes a VNA runtime system on a user-side terminal load a VNA definition appropriate for the task. Virtual Plug&Play dynamically discovers required VNA components and establishes the message graph as defined. Since XML documents are used to describe a VNA, users can share and customize it easily. We call the device integration done by Virtual Plug&Play top-down integration, which existing middleware do not aim at. Finally, we show that Virtual Plug&Play affords practical performance for top-down integration by performance evaluation.

Crowdedness of buses is playing an increasingly important role in the disease control of COVID-19. The lack of a practical approach to sensing the crowdedness of buses is a major problem. This paper proposes a bus crowdedness sensing system which exploits deep learning-based object detection to count the numbers of passengers getting on and off a bus and thus estimate the crowdedness of buses in real time. In our prototype system, we combine YOLOv5s object detection model with Kalman Filter object tracking algorithm to implement a sensing algorithm running on a Jetson nano-based vehicular device mounted on a bus. By using the driving recorder video data taken from real bus, we experimentally evaluate the performance of the proposed sensing system to verify that our proposed system system improves counting accuracy and achieves real-time processing at the Jetson Nano platform.