Privacy violations via spy cameras are becoming increasingly serious. With the recent advent of various smart home IoT devices, such as smart TVs and robot vacuum cleaners, spycam attacks that steal users' information are being carried out in more unpredictable ways. In this paper, we introduce a new spycam attack on a mobile WebVR environment. It is performed by a web attacker who maliciously accesses the back-facing cameras of victims' mobile devices while they are browsing the attacker's WebVR site. This has the power to allow the attacker to capture victims' surroundings even at the desired field of view through sophisticated content placement in VR scenes, resulting in serious privacy breaches for mobile VR users. In this letter, we introduce a new threat facing mobile VR and show that it practically works with major browsers in a stealthy manner.

Despite the recent advances in personal communication devices and access network technology, users still face problems such as high device maintenance costs, complication of inter-device cooperation, illegal access to devices, and leakage of personal information. Consequently, it is difficult for users to construct a secure network with local as well as remote personal devices. We propose a User-driven Service Creation Platform (USCP), which enables users to construct a secure private network using a simple and intuitive approach that leverages the authentication mechanism in mobile phone networks. USCP separates signaling and data paths in a flat, virtual network topology. In this paper, we describe the basic design of USCP, the current implementation, and system evaluations.

This paper presents a fault-tolerance scheme based on mobile agents for the reliable mobile computing systems. Mobility of the agent is suitable to trace the mobile hosts and the intelligence of the agent makes it efficient to support the fault tolerance services. This paper presents two approaches to implement the mobile agent based fault tolerant service and their performances are evaluated and compared with other fault-tolerant schemes.

We present a decentralized VPN service that can be built over generalized mobile ad-hoc networks (Generalized MANETs), in which topologies can be represented as a time-varying directed multigraph. We address wireless ad-hoc networks and overlay ad-hoc networks as instances of Generalized MANETs. We first propose an architecture to operate on various kinds of networks through a single set of operations. Then, we design and implement a decentralized VPN service on the proposed architecture. Through the development and operation of a prototype system we implemented, we found that the proposed architecture makes the VPN service applicable to each instance of Generalized MANETs, and that the VPN service makes it possible for unmodified applications to operate on the networks.

This paper presents a new methodology, Beacognition, for real-time discovery of the associations between a signal space and arbitrarily defined regions, termed as Semantically Meaningful Areas (SMAs), in the corresponding physical space. It lets the end users develop semantically meaningful location systems using standard 802.11 network beacons as they roam through their environment. The key idea is to discover the unique associations using a beacon popularity model. The popularity measurements are then used to localize the mobile devices. The beacon popularity is computed using an election' algorithm and a new recognition model is presented to perform the localization task. We have implemented such a location system in a five story campus building. The comparative results show significant improvement in localization by achieving on average 83% SMA and 88% Floor recognition rate in less than one minute per SMA training time.

Fault-tolerance is an important design issue in building a reliable mobile computing system. This paper considers checkpointing recovery services for a mobile computing system based on the ad-hoc network environment. Since potential problems of this new environment are insufficient power and limited storage capacity, the proposed scheme tries to reduce disk access frequency for saving recovery information, and also the amount of information saved for recovery. A brief simulation study has been performed and the results show that the proposed scheme takes advantage of the existing checkpointing recovery schemes.

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.

We present MobileOBJ, a formal framework for specifying and verifying mobile systems. Based on hidden algebra, the components of a mobile system are specified as behavioral objects or Observational Transition Systems, a kind of transition system, enriched with special action and observation operators related to the distinct characteristics of mobile computing systems. The whole system comes up as the concurrent composition of these components. The implementation of the abstract model is achieved using CafeOBJ, an executable, industrial strength algebraic specification language. The visualization of the specification can be done using CafeOBJ graphical notation. In addition, invariant and behavioral properties of mobile systems can be proved through theorem proving techniques, such as structural induction and coinduction that are fully supported by the CafeOBJ system. The application of the proposed framework is presented through the modeling of a mobile computing environment and the services that need to be supported by the former.

The default server strategy is commonly used to manage the location and state of mobile hosts in cellular networks. With this strategy, connections can be established after the client obtains the location information of the mobile host by querying the default server. Unfortunately, the communication cost increases if the query requests are frequent and the distance between the default server and the client is long. Still more, no connection to a mobile host can be established when the default server of the destination mobile host fails. These problems can be solved by replicating the default servers and by letting the nearest replicated default server process the query request which is sent from a client [9]. It is important to allocate replicated default servers efficiently in networks and determine the number of replicated default servers. In this paper, we suggest and evaluate a default server replication strategy to reduce communication costs and to improve service availabilities. We consider optimal replication degree as well as location for replicating the default servers in n-grid and tree networks.

Network Mobility (NEMO) Basic Support is the standard protocol to provide continuous network connectivity and movement transparency to a group of nodes moving together, as in a vehicle. However, the protocol suffers from sub-optimal routing and packet overhead caused by a bi-directional tunnel between the Mobile Router (MR) connecting the mobile network to the Internet and its Home Agent (HA). When a nested NEMO is formed, these inefficiencies become intolerable for real-time multimedia applications. To optimize the delivery of these packets, this study proposes Optimized NEMO (ONEMO) that is capable of providing an optimal path with minimum packet overhead in various scenarios with nested mobility. The protocol is designed to offer the path with minimum signaling overhead and functional requirements are limited to its MRs. Evaluation through measurements against NEMO Basic Support and comparison among other solutions showed effectiveness of the protocol.

Mobile applications require software reconfiguration to improve resource usage and availability. We propose a power-aware reconfiguration scheme that (1) moves energy-demanding applications to proxy servers, and (2) adjusts the fidelity of mobile applications as resources diminish. We formulate a cooperative reconfiguration plan which determines when, where, and which components should be deployed and have their fidelity controlled, so as to minimize the power consumption of mobile devices and to utilize the system resources of servers efficiently. We then construct a graph-theoretic model of the cost of migrating components to one proxy server or to a cluster of servers. In this model, changes to the residual energy of mobile devices, available server resources, and the wireless network bandwidth can all accelerate or decelerate the migration and fidelity control of applications. We suggest an approximation algorithm that achieves a near-optimal solution in terms of energy consumption. Our proposal will support mobile applications which require large amount of computation and need to maintain their services for an extended time such as video conferencing, multimedia e-mail, and real-time navigation. Simulation-based experiments verify that our scheme is an efficient way to extend the battery life of mobile devices and to improve the response time of mobile applications.

Our group is exploring interactive multi- and hypermedia, especially applied to virtual and mixed reality multimodal groupware systems. We are researching user interfaces to control source→sink transmissions in synchronous groupware (like teleconferences, chatspaces, virtual concerts, etc.). We have developed two interfaces for privacy visualization of narrowcasting (selection) functions in collaborative virtual environments (CVES): for a workstation WIMP (windows/icon/menu/pointer) GUI (graphical user interface), and for networked mobile devices, 2.5- and 3rd-generation mobile phones. The interfaces are integrated with other CVE clients, interoperating with a heterogeneous multimodal groupware suite, including stereographic panoramic browsers and spatial audio backends & speaker arrays. The narrowcasting operations comprise an idiom for selective attention, presence, and privacy-- an infrastructure for rich conferencing capability.

Power saving is an important issue in the mobile computing environment. In this paper, we propose a broadcast mechanism that constructs the broadcast channels according to the access frequency of each type of message in order to save power in mobile stations. The pinwheel scheduling algorithm presented in this paper is used to organize all types of messages in the broadcast channels in the most symmetrical distribution in order to reduce both the tuning and access time. The multichannel broadcast mechanism is also discussed for use when the number of message types increases. The performance of the proposed mechanism is analyzed, and the improvement over existing methods is demonstrated numerically. The results show that the proposed mechanism is capable improving both the tuning and access time due to the presence of skewness in the access distribution among the disseminated messages. When the number of message types increase, both the tuning and access time can be further improved as long as a small number of broadcast channels are added.

On the Internet, two different IP protocols are deployed such as IPv4 and IPv6. The Mobile Router uses the basic NEMO protocol which is IPv6 protocol specific. During the early period of time that IPv6 transition is occurring it is very likely that a Mobile Router will move to an IPv4 only access network. When this occurs the Mobile Router will no longer be able to operate using the basic NEMO protocol. There has already been some earlier work to provide IPv6 capability over an IPv4 access network for a Mobile Router. This paper provides a capability by to maintain IPv6 connectivity for the Mobile Router via its Home Agent with IPv4-in-IPv6 encapsulation with no special boxes to be deployed elsewhere in the network.

In this paper, we propose an advanced location-based service that we call a direction-based service, which utilizes both the position and direction of a user. The direction-based service enables a user to point to an object of interest for command or investigation. We also describe the design, implementation and evaluations of a direction-based service system named Azim. With this system, the direction of the user can be obtained by a magnetic-based direction sensor. The sensor is also used for azimuth-based position estimation, in which a user's position is estimated by having the user point to and measure azimuths of several markers or objects whose positions are already known. Because this approach does not require any other accurate position sensors or positive beacons, it can be deployed cost-effectively. Also, because the measurements are naturally associated with some degree of error, the position is calculated as a probability distribution. The calculation considers the error of direction measurement and the pre-obtained field information such as obstacles and magnetic field disturbance, which enables robust position measurements even in geomagnetically disturbed environments. For wide-area use, the system also utilizes a wireless LAN to obtain rough position information by identifying base stations. We have implemented a prototype system for the proposed method and some applications for the direction-based services. Furthermore, we have conducted experiments both indoors and outdoors, and exemplified that positioning accuracy by the proposed method is precise enough for a direction-based service.

Mobile IP provides an efficient and scalable mechanism for host mobility within the Internet. Using Mobile IP, mobile nodes may change their point of attachment to the Internet without changing their IP address. In contrast to the advantages of Mobile IP, updating the location of a mobile node incurs high signaling costs if the mobile node moves frequently. Thus, IP paging schemes for Mobile IP have been proposed to avoid unnecessary registration signaling overhead when a mobile node is idle. However, they require the additional paging costs and delays associated with message delivery when a correspondent node sends packets to the idle mobile node. These delays greatly influence the quality of service (QoS) for multimedia services. Moreover, existing IP paging schemes do not consider a hierarchical mobility management scheme, which can reduce signaling costs by the significant geographic locality in user mobility pattern. Thus, we propose a novel IP paging protocol which can be used in hierarchical Mobile IPv6 networks. In addition, our proposal can reduce signaling costs for paging and delay using the concept of the anchor-cell. The cost analysis presented in this paper shows that our proposal has superior performance when the session-to-mobility ratio value of the mobile node is low.

Broadcasting in wireless mobile computing environments is an effective technique to disseminate information to a massive number of clients equipped with powerful, battery operated devices. To conserve the usage of energy, which is scarce resource, the information to be broadcast must be organized so that the client can selectively tune in at the desired portion of the broadcast. In this letter, the power efficient behavior of a predeclaration-based transaction processing in mobile broadcast environments is examined. The analytical studies have been performed to observe the effectiveness of predeclaration-based transaction processing combined with selective tuning ability in mobile broadcast environments.

In this paper, we present a group communication protocol that achieves total ordering message delivery for mobile computing systems with multiple overlapping groups. Our mechanism is an efficient adaptation of the propagation-tree technique to the mobile computing environments. It takes advantages of the capability of stationary mobile support stations to overcome the deficiencies associated with mobile devices. We construct the propagation tree based on the stationary stations, rather than the mobile hosts. As a result, mobile hosts are relieved of the excessive load of forwarding messages and communications on wireless channels are confined to transmitting messages to destination processes. This is important considering that the bandwidth of the wireless channels is limited. Moreover, the proposed protocol employs a mechanism to synchronize transmissions within a wireless cell. This serves to avoid redundant transmissions of a message in a wireless network in an attempt to achieve better utilization of the network bandwidth. Our mechanism relies on a handoff operation to deal with mobility of mobile devices. The handoff procedure ensures a smooth integration of a mobile host into a new cell, while preserving reliability of communication and the total ordering property of message delivery.

This paper presents a network architecture with a dual interface IP handoff technique that allows smooth node mobility without using any intermediate proxy. The proposed architecture is suitable for low bit-rate time sensitive real time applications, where payload tends to be short and packet header overhead is particularly significant. Connections are established as per permanent addresses of the nodes but are carried on by the IP layer according to the temporary addresses by address translation within the end hosts. The mapping information is maintained by database servers, which can be placed in the Internet in a distributed manner. We describe the architecture and show its mobile capabilities by prototype implementation and performance evaluation. Furthermore a dual-interface handoff suitable to the proposed architecture is also introduced. Preliminary results show that the proposed architecture has significantly low overheads. It is compatible with the existing infrastructure and works fine in both IPv4 and IPv6 environments. Analysis also shows that with dual-interface handoff it is possible to achieve seamless handoff without any packet loss by exploiting overlapping coverage area and speed of the mobile node. Handoff latency is reduced significantly as compare to MIPv6. We believe that with more powerful network interface card drivers our concept of dual interface handoff can be realized.

This paper presents a new mobility protocol that supports multiple namespaces on IPv6 networks. Our proposed protocol framework allows a mobile node to specify a correspondent node by a name that is defined in any namespace as a node identifier. This technique removes certain restrictions on the space of node identifiers and allows mobile nodes to communicate with each other regardless of their location. Mobile nodes negotiate a pseudo node identifier, which is unique between the two nodes, with a correspondent node that is identified by the name. We make this pseudo node identifier compatible with the IPv6 address format; we can thus use existing IPv6 applications with our proposed mobility framework. This framework is based on Location Independent Network Architecture (LINA), and provides mobility support in a simple fashion and with low protocol overhead. We also demonstrate how to provide anonymity to our mobility protocol by using a dynamic pseudo node identifier. Our prototype implementation shows minimal overhead compared to a conventional IPv6 implementation.