In recent years, ubiquitous and pervasive scenarios have emerged as a complex ecosystem where differentiated software/hardware components interoperate wirelessly and seamlessly. The goal is to enable users to continuously access services and contents, and to always get the best out of their current environment and available resources. In such dynamic and flexible scenarios, the need emerges for flexible and general solutions for continuous runtime self-reconfiguration and self-optimization of ubiquitous support software systems. This paper proposes a fully reconfigurable middleware approach that aims at reconfiguring complex software systems made up of heterogeneous off-the-shelf components from both functional and non-functional perspectives. Our middleware can also extend already existing and non-reconfigurable middleware/applications in an easy and flexible way, with no need to re-design them. The proposed design principles have been practically applied to the implementation of a runtime self-reconfigurable middleware called Off-The-Shelf Ready To Go (OTS-RTG), implemented on top of iPOJO. The reported experimental results both exhibit a limited overhead and show the wide applicability of the proposed solution to many application scenarios, including complex, industrial, Enterprise Service Bus-based ones.

A vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) consists of vehicles that form a network without any additional infrastructure, thus allowing the vehicles to communicate with each other. VANETs have unique characteristics, including high node mobility and rapidly changing network topology. Because of these characteristics, routing algorithms based on greedy forwarding such as greedy perimeter stateless routing (GPSR) are known to be very suitable for a VANET. However, greedy forwarding just selects the node nearest to the destination node as a relay node within its transmission range. This increases the possibility of a local maximum and link loss because of the high mobility of vehicles and the road characteristics in urban areas. Therefore, this paper proposes a reliability-improving position-based routing (RIPR) algorithm to solve those problems. The RIPR algorithm predicts the positions, velocities, and moving directions of vehicles after receiving beacon messages, and estimates information about road characteristics to select the relay node. Thus, it can reduce the possibility of getting a local maximum and link breakage. Simulation results using ns-2 revealed that the proposed routing protocol performs much better than the existing routing protocols based on greedy forwarding.

In this paper, a new clear channel assessment (CCA) method: cascaded-CCA, is proposed. The primary motivation for the proposed approach is to integrate the respective advantages of two standard CCA mechanisms, energy detect and preamble detect, to arrive at a new dual threshold CCA family that can provide greater flexibility towards tuning MAC performance. Cascaded-CCA integrates energy efficiency of the energy detector (ED) and the reliability of the preamble detector (PD). The probability of detection/false alarm and power consumption of cascaded-CCA in the CCA modules of IEEE 802.11b are analyzed and compared with ED and PD as an example. The performance of cascaded-CCA is explored via MATLAB simulations that implement the CCA modules and medium access control (MAC) protocol for IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15.4. Simulation results showed that cascaded-CCA improves the energy efficiency significantly compared to ED-only or PD-only CCA. In addition, ED, PD, and cascaded CCA are applied to a cognitive network scenario to validate the effectiveness of the proposed cascaded-CCA.

Background compensation plays an important role in detecting and isolating object motion in visual tracking. Here, we propose a Genetic Hough Transform, which combines the Hough Transform and Genetic Algorithm, as a method for eliminating background motion. Our method can handle cases in which the background may contain only a few, if any, feature points. These points can be used to estimate the motion between two successive frames. In addition to dealing with featureless backgrounds, our method can successfully handle motion blur. Experimental comparisons of the results obtained using the proposed method with other methods show that the proposed approach yields a satisfactory estimate of background motion.

This paper presents a low-complexity algorithm for an H.264/AVC encoder. The proposed motion estimation scheme determines the best coding mode for a given macroblock (MB) by finding motion-blurred MBs; identifying, before motion estimation, an early selection of MBs; and hence saving processing time for these MBs. It has been observed that human vision is more sensitive to the movement of well-structured objects than to the movement of randomly structured objects. This study analyzed permissible perceptual distortions and assigned a larger inter-mode value to the regions that are perceptually less sensitive to human vision. Simulation results illustrate that the algorithm can reduce the computational complexity of motion estimation by up to 47.16% while maintaining high compression efficiency.

A method to detect Trojan horses in messaging and Bluetooth in mobile phones by means of monitoring the events produced by the infections is presented in this paper. The structure of the detection approach is split into two modules: the first is the Monitoring module which controls connection requests and sent/received files, and the second is the Graphical User module which shows messages and, under suspicious situations, reports the user about a possible malware. Prototypes have been implemented on different mobile operating systems to test its feasibility on real cellphone malware. Experimental results are shown to be promising since this approach effectively detects various known malware.

As used product transactions are currently on the rise, the demand for transactions of secondhand digital content will grow in the future; thus, learning to make secure transactions while avoiding cyber attacks becomes an important issue. In this paper, we combine the new buyer's secret key, the new buyer's watermark to embed in resold digital content, and the reseller's encrypted watermark, which can prove legal ownership of the reseller. Using the privacy homomorphism property of RSA and exponential calculus, the original seller of digital content can verify the legality of the reseller and the new buyer. We also reduced the load of encryption/decryption digital content using a partial encryption/decryption algorithm to make our protocol more efficient and practical. In the proposed protocol, the seller is not able to conduct piracy and easily frame any other innocent secondhand buyer when a case of piracy is found. In fact, piracy can be clearly traced using the privacy homomorphism property of RSA and the embedded watermark mechanism. Further, in the proposed protocol, the seller himself can trace the piracy using exponential calculus. Since it is unnecessary to trust third party participation, the conspiracy problem is resolved and the new buyer is not required to participate in the dispute. Moreover, the seller, reseller and new buyer can simultaneously benefit from the secondhand transaction.