Factors influencing users’ employment of mobile map services

This study introduces an integrated research model to examine user acceptance of mobile map services, hypothesizing potential causal connections between key cognitive factors and users’ intention to use the services. This study determined potential variables that may be significantly related to perceived usefulness of mobile map services through in-depth interviews with two groups: a user and an expert group. Collected data of 1109 users who took part in the internet survey were analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results indicate that satisfaction with and perceived usefulness of the mobile map services were the most significant antecedents of users’ attitude toward the services and behavioral intention to use them. Users’ attitude and flow state also affected their intention to use the services, while perceived locational accuracy, service, and display quality had notable effects on attitude. This study demonstrates the significant effects of these and other examined factors, and the findings reveal that flow played a multiple moderating roles significantly affecting various connections in the integrated research model. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Barriers and drivers in the adoption of current and future mobile services in Finland

Finland has long been seen as the most successful country in Europe in terms of the adoption and use of advanced mobile services. In this paper we discuss the importance of understanding the role of (physical, cognitive, security and economic) barriers and benefits (perceived entertainment value and perceived flexibility) of mobile services as well as the role that functional differences of mobile service bundles play in the process of actual and future use of these bundles. Based on a survey we test six models for mobile travel service bundle, GPRS bundle, mobile surveillance bundle, traditional and more advanced entertainment bundles and m-commerce service bundles. Our analysis shows that understanding the actual and future use is only possible when the subtleties of the specific bundles, i.e. the characteristics of the involved services, are taken into account. Differences in technology or service attributes based on technology cannot be treated as neutral.     

MobiWorp: Mitigation of the wormhole attack in mobile multihop wireless networks

In multihop wireless systems, the need for cooperation among nodes to relay each other’s packets exposes them to a wide range of security attacks. A particularly devastating attack is the wormhole attack, where a malicious node records control traffic at one location and tunnels it to a colluding node, possibly far away, which replays it locally. This can have an adverse effect on route establishment by preventing nodes from discovering legitimate routes that are more than two hops away. Previous works on tolerating wormhole attacks have focused only on detection and used specialized hardware, such as directional antennas or extremely accurate clocks. More recent work has addressed the problem of locally isolating the malicious nodes. However, all of this work has been done in the context of static networks due to the difficulty of secure neighbor discovery with mobile nodes. The existing work on secure neighbor discovery has limitations in accuracy, resource requirements, and applicability to ad hoc and sensor networks. In this paper, we present a countermeasure for the wormhole attack, called MobiWorp, which alleviates these drawbacks and efficiently mitigates the wormhole attack in mobile networks. MobiWorp uses a secure central authority (CA) for global tracking of node positions. Local monitoring is used to detect and isolate malicious nodes locally. Additionally, when sufficient suspicion builds up at the CA, it enforces a global isolation of the malicious node from the whole network. The effect of MobiWorp on the data traffic and the fidelity of detection is brought out through extensive simulation using ns-2. The results show that as time progresses, the data packet drop ratio goes to zero with MobiWorp due the capability of MobiWorp to detect, diagnose and isolate malicious nodes. With an appropriate choice of design parameters, MobiWorp is shown to completely eliminate framing of a legitimate node by malicious nodes, at the cost of a slight increase in the drop ratio. The results also show that increasing mobility of the nodes degrades the performance of MobiWorp.