Research On Key Technologies Of Ambient Intelligence Middleware For Mobile Terminals

Ambient intelligence(AmI) brings intelligence to people’s daily life activities as well as work environments and thus makes those environments sensitive and responsive to people’s behaviors, which facilitates integration of physical space and virtual cyberspace. It aims to support users in performing their daily life and work activities in a simple, natural and non-intrusive manner by enabling intelligent interaction with ubiquitous smart devices. The fact that AmI systems are intelligent, transparent, adaptive, embedded and ubiquitous brings challenges for their design and implementation. However, an AmI middleware is essential to build an AmI system, as it can resolve the heterogeneity problem of AmI environments, as well as provide common services such as smart sensing, context modeling, context reasoning, context management, etc. As a result, an AmI middleware plays a very important role in simplifying AmI system development and promoting service capacity of an AmI system.Near field communication(NFC) technology makes it possible to exchange data wirelessly among electronic devices within a short distance. Its emergence enables mobile terminals to interact with AmI environments in a simpler and easier way. Based on NFC, AmI systems can perceive contexts of the AmI environments and actively use those contexts to provide the user with adaptive and personalized services whenever and wherever is needed. Popularity of smartphones and tablets has made mobile terminals become ideal platforms for deploying AmI systems. However, because of the platform heterogeneity of mobile devices and the complexity of context collection and management, developing an AmI system for mobile terminals is not a trivial task and has large workloads. But the existing AmI middlewares do not fully take into account the characteristics of the mobile environment including limited computation and storage resources, various NFC operating modes, personalized and high-security service demands, and can thus hardly meet the requirements of AmI applications for mobile terminals.By analyzing the development status and trend of the AmI middleware technology and the requirements of an AmI middleware for mobile computing environments, this dissertation proposes an HTML5-based lightweight AmI middleware framework, which hides the complexity of developing an AmI system to be deployed on mobile terminals, and presents sample AmI application systems built using the framework to show effectiveness of the approach.The main research contents and achievements of this dissertation include:1. In consideration of the difficulties of cross-platform development and deployment of a mobile AmI application, this dissertation proposes an HTML5-based lightweight AmI middleware framework for mobile terminals, which offers execution environment for HTML5-based AmI web applications, through researching on technologies including web application lifecycle management, device’s native API invoking by web applications, access control for context acquisition, ontology-based context modeling and reasoning, etc. By extending capability of the web engine of the mobile terminal for accessing to the device’s native APIs, the framework provides rich and extensible context acquisition interfaces, which resolves the problem that web applications running in traditional web browsers cannot directly collect context information from the device’s sensors. By providing easy-to-use service interfaces for context retrieval, subscription, etc., the framework hides the complexity of context management and utilization. By delegating the computationally expensive tasks, like context reasoning, to the server side, the context management overhead of the mobile client is greatly reduced. The practical application built using the framework shows that the framework has good usability and extendibility.2. Mobile AmI applications have been used in many scenarios including smart home, smart library, mobile payment, etc. However, since these applications generally involve user’s privacy or confidential information, secure deployment and management of them need to be fully guaranteed. For that reason, after intensively researching on methods for deploying and managing AmI applications on the secure element(SE), this dissertation proposes a framework for trusted AmI application management, which provides services including secure distribution and lifecycle management of AmI applications and thus effectively hides the complexity of deploying AmI applications on the SE.3. The fact that traditional mobile operation systems do not provide effective security protection mechanism for storing application’s sensitive data brings challenges for storing AmI application’s data securely. Although the SE of the mobile terminal can provide applications with secure and trusted execution environment, the existing SE platforms still lack common data storage mechanism for SE applications. As a result, application developers have to provide their own SE-based application data storage solutions for AmI applications with requirements for secure data storage, and the difficulty of developing an AmI application is greatly increased. To handle the common problem, this dissertation presents a common mechanism for secure data storage and data access control for AmI applications, which provides simple and easy-to-use services for accessing and storing data securely.4. Mobile terminals are enabled to interact with AmI environments intelligently based on NFC technology. However, as information security problem is getting more and more prominent, how to ensure the security of NFC-based intelligent interaction becomes an important issue that needs to resolve urgently. This dissertation concretely researches on secure data exchange technology in NFC reader/writer mode, peer to peer(P2P) mode and card emulation mode respectively and then proposes a secure mechanism for securely exchanging NFC context of AmI applications.