Web Services Approach for Ambient Assisted Living in Mobile Environments

107 Pages·2013·2.79 MB·English

by  Joel Fernandes

UNIVERSIDADE DA BEIRA INTERIOR
Faculdade de Engenharia
Departamento de Informática

Web Services Approach for
Ambient Assisted Living in
Mobile Environments

Joel Lourenço Fernandes

Submitted to the University of Beira Interior in candidature for the
Degree of Master of Science in Informatics Engineering

Supervised by Prof. Dr. Joel José Puga Coelho Rodrigues

Departamento de Informática
University of Beira Interior
Covilhã, Portugal
http://www.di.ubi.pt
This work has been partially supported by the Instituto de
Telecomunicações, Next Generation Networks and Applications Group
(NetGNA), Portugal, by National Funding from the FCT – Fundação para a
Ciência e Tecnologia through the Pest-OE/EEI/LA0008/2011, and by the
AAL4ALL (Ambient Assisted Living for All), project co-financed by the
European Community Fund FEDER through COMPETE – Programa
Operacional Factores de Competitividade.

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Acknowledgements

First of all, I would like to thank Prof. Joel José Puga Coelho
Rodrigues for giving me a chance to join the Next Generation Networks and
Applications Research Group (NetGNA), for all the constant words of
encouragement and for supervising my Master’s Thesis. The last year was
undoubtedly very important in my evolution has Informatics Engineer as a
person as well.
I am most grateful to the University of Beira Interior, the Instituto
de Telecomunicações, Next Generation Networks and Applications Group
(NetGNA), Covilhã Delegation, Portugal, by National Funding from the FCT –
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia through the PEst-
OE/EEI/LA0008/2011 Project, by the AAL4ALL (Ambient Assisted Living for
All), project co-financed by the European Community Fund FEDER through
COMPETE – Programa Operacional Factores de Competitividade.
Many thanks to all members of NetGNA, particularly Ivo Lopes, Fábio
Canelo, Edgar Horta and João Dias.
And of course, a enormous thanks to my parents, my sister, my
family and my girlfriend, for their constant support and for all words of
motivation.

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Abstract

Web services appeared as a promising technology for Web
environments independent of technologies, services, and applications.
First, a performance comparison study between the two most used Web
service architectures, SOAP and REST, is presented, considering messages
exchange between clients and a server. Based on this study, the REST
architecture was chosen to deploy the system because it gets better results
compared to SOAP architecture. Currently, there are some issues related
with this approach that should be studied. For instance, if massive
quantities of data are sent to databases it can influence significantly the
performance of the whole system. The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol
(AMPQ) appears as a promising solution to address this problem. Then, in
order to evaluate the performance of this approach, this work presents a
performance evaluation and a comparison study of RESTful Web services
and the AMQP Protocol considering exchanging messages between clients
and a server. The study is based on the averaged exchanged messages for a
certain period of time. It was observed and concluded that, for large
quantities of messages exchange, the best results comes from the Advanced
Message Queuing Protocol. Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT)
was addressed in this work because it is a similar protocol to AMQP but it
can be used by mobile devices with a processing capacity smallest unlike
the AMQP that needs greater processing capacity. These studies are
performed in the context of Ambient Assisted Living environments, since
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the work was applied to this topic in order to experiment the effectiveness
and evaluate the performance of these protocols in this scenario.
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Keywords

Web Services, RESTful, Advanced Message Queuing Protocol, AMQP,
Message Queuing Telemetry Transport, MQTT, RabbitMQ, Ambient Assisted
Living, AAL.

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