editorial emerging trends in mobile collaborative systems

EditorialEmerging Trends in Mobile Collaborative Systems

Sergio F. Ochoa,1 Weiming Shen,2 Giancarlo Fortino,3 and Wenfeng Li4

1Department of Computer Science, University of Chile, 837-0456 Santiago, Chile2National Research Council of Canada, Ottawa, ON, Canada K1A 0R63Department of Informatics, Modeling, Electronics and Systems, University of Calabria, 87036 Rende, Italy4School of Logistics Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430070, China

Correspondence should be addressed to Sergio F. Ochoa; [email protected]

Received 18 July 2016; Accepted 19 July 2016

Copyright © 2016 Sergio F. Ochoa et al.This is an open access article distributed under the Creative CommonsAttribution License,which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

During the last decades mobile collaborative systems havebecome transversal applications that provide services notonly to end-users, but also to other systems like mobilesocial applications, context-aware recommender systems,monitoring systems, and crowd sourcing and participatorysensing applications. Providing support services in mobilecollaboration scenarios is complex, because the work contextof each participant could be different, and also such a contextis dynamic. Moreover, these solutions involve a wide range ofdevices that should interoperate to provide particular servicesin heterogeneous scenarios, like in Internet of Things basedworking contexts.

Regardless the advantages that these systems bring to themobile collaboration research and application domains, theyalso raise several challenges to systemdevelopers, particularlyin terms of design, implementation, use, and evaluationof these solutions. This special issue covers some of thenew trends and challenges of these systems, by presentinginteresting articles that were accepted after a rigorous peer-reviewing process.

One of the key issues in this computing scenario is thepositioning of the nodes, since their mobility usually makesthem change their work context and therefore the servicesthat they can consume and provide to other nodes. Posi-tion accuracy (particularly in indoor environments), energyconsumption, and deployment effort of these solutions areaspects highly researched by the community. In this sense,the paper by W. Kim et al. proposes a localization methodnamed FreeLoc that deals with major technical issues inthe crowdsourcing-based systems that involve indoor posi-tioning. This method uses existing Wi-Fi infrastructure forperforming the positioning and it does not require calibration

(fingerprinting). This approach also considers the hetero-geneity of devices that are usually available in a crowdsourc-ing scenario, which represents an important advance towardseasy-to-deploy indoor positioning systems.

The paper by S.-H. Lee et al. also helps improve thepositioning capability of these systems. It focuses on thepositioning accuracy. The article proposes a beacon-basedindoor positioning method, using an extended Kalman filterthat recursively processes positioning information that alsoincludes noise.This method improves the accuracy of indoorpositioning techniques by fusing the information about theresources location with the data obtained from existingwireless indoor positioning technology. Thus, this methodallows reaching average positioning errors that are between26 and 28 centimeters.

The systems mentioned above usually have high powerconsumption since they exchange an important number ofmessages, not only to perform the positioning but also tosupport the mobile collaboration process. Many researcheshave already been done to reduce the energy consumptionof mobile collaborative applications. In this sense, the paperby J. E. Luzuriaga et al. proposes an extension to the well-known publish/subscribe scheme of the MQTT protocol, byintroducing an intermediate buffer that takes care of messagetransfer. The experimental evaluation in a real environmentshows that the nodes movement has a marginal impact in themessage transfer. Particularly, this proposal guarantees thatno information loss appears in the presence of variable lengthhandoffs.

The paper by M. Chincoli et al. also explores the energyconsumption from a different perspective. It analyzes theconditions under which coordinated power reduction in

Hindawi Publishing CorporationMobile Information SystemsVolume 2016, Article ID 3421901, 2 pageshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2016/3421901

2 Mobile Information Systems

wireless sensor networks may lead to increasing its efficiency,mitigating interference, and thus improving the networkperformance. Using simulations the authors analyze the rela-tionship between transmission power and communicationefficiency, in order to determine how appropriate powerreduction can improve both energy and spectrum efficiency.

The paper by L. Li et al. also addresses the energyconsumption, but analyzing the network efficiency in termsof information dissemination.This work presents a novel andefficient model for studying the effect of nodes on informa-tion diffusion over mobile social networks. The proposal isbased on the universal generating function method and thediscrete stress-strength interference theory. In thismodel, theeffect of the users on information diffusion is quantified asnode susceptibility, and, based on that, the proposed modelhelps various decision-makers identify the most susceptiblenodes to the corresponding information at different timeperiods.

The paper by T. Shin J. Byun presents a social-enabler (S-Enabler) middleware architecture for supporting the devel-opment of social IoT-based smart systems. This middlewarehelps convert the existing objects into social objects, andit was used for supporting the activities of vehicle socialnetworks focusing on its energy saving. By using sharing andcompetition strategies the energy saving service can reduceenergy consumption by up to 31.7% per node.

The mobile collaborative systems can impact severalapplications domains; particularly, the papers by D. E. Ariaset al. and A. Neyem et al. present two systems focusedon healthcare. The first paper introduces a mobile sensingdevice for supporting mobility of people using wheelchair.These chairs are instrumented with various sensors to getinformation from the user pressure relief habits, activitylevels, vital signs, and ambient conditions. The results of acase study performed during two weeks, involving six full-time wheelchair users, indicate the system is able to capturepressure relief patterns and tilt-in-space usage, a mechanismrequired to avoid pressure ulcers. With a different goal, thepaper of A. Neyem et al. presents a cloud-based mobile sys-tem for supporting team collaboration, risk evaluation, anddecision-making while patients in critical health conditionare transported between health centers. This system helpslocal and remote medical personnel to stay aware of thepatients’ status in real time and take preventive actions andearly response activities when required. Thus, the systemintends to increase the safety of the interhospital transfers.

Collectively, this corpus of knowledge advances the stateof the art in the mobile collaborative systems domain, and itprovides insights for new researches and applications in thisarea.

Sergio F. OchoaWeiming Shen

Giancarlo FortinoWenfeng Li

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