Abstract
This paper presents a network architecture for provisioning communal Internet access services to residential customers. The advantages of adopting the proposed architecture are enumerated both for Internet Service Providers (ISP) and residential clients. The paper presents also the CommGate, a gateway specially developed for managing the network traffic through multiple communal accesses,. Tests were carried out simulating several community scenarios with different number of customers and generating different traffic loads. The results allow us to conclude about the performance of the CommGate and the benefits of the proposed architecture.

Abstract
The residential networking market is evolving and new operating paradigms are emerging. The ubiquitous use of Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) networks is increasing the demands on SOHO routers. These economical network elements, however, are too simple to deal with the high demands of their users, especially in residential settings where P2P, video and VoIP traffic is becoming predominant. This paper presents a communal gateway CommGate - that enables individuals in a building to share multiple communal Internet links and service facilities. The paper presents also some tests simulating several user communities with different number of customers characterized by different profiles (cf. Gold, Silver and Bronze) and generating different traffic loads. These tests illustrate the benefits of using the CommGate and the usefulness of the proposed communal architecture.

Abstract
The humanity is currently facing the difficulties of an aged society with an ever-growing predominance of chronic diseases and associated problems (e.g., mobility issues, possibility of falls, etc.). Traditional hospital or clinical internment is not an efficient answer both in terms of human, therapeutic or economical aspects. Alternatively, ambulatory and home healthcare are becoming preferred and predominant solutions. However, the typical home environment is not suited nor prepared for monitoring and helping to take care of elderly and/or disabled people. To overcome some of these issues, this paper proposes a wireless low cost hardware solution based on a microcontroller with several sensors (cf. temperature, oxymeter, 3-axis accelerometer) which allows monitoring several physiological parameters (e.g., temperature, heart bit, etc.) and infer human activities (e.g., standing, walking, falling, etc.) of home confined people. A similar platform with ambient temperature and light sensors was also created for monitoring the home environment. The collected data is pre-processed on the sensor nodes and then transmitted to a wireless gateway allowing the backend system to log the patient activity, his health condition as well as the living surroundings. Finally, a web application is provided to healthcare professionals for viewing, analyzing and statistically operating this information, thus empowering homecare.

Abstract
Statistics show an aging trend in the world population, which will progressively overload existing health systems. Therefore, we believe that ubiquitous computing will play an important role in domicile settings, coping with the growing need for automated home healthcare support, especially for the sick and elderly. The integration of independently developed off-the-shelf systems (e.g., health-monitoring, entertainment, communications, home automation, etc.) may cause unplanned interactions between them (cf. feature interactions). This is a major concern since the correct/expected behavior of an isolated system may not be the same when deployed in conjunction with other systems, causing interferences, i.e., unexpected outcomes or misbehaviors. The Safe Home Care project tackles this problem to pursuit the safe deployment and reconfiguration of home healthcare smart-spaces. We propose the use of state graphs to represent off-the-shelf systems and predict the occurrence of intra-system's feature interactions. We use pre-deployment simulations to forecast feature interactions before deployment. We assess the applicability and correctness of this approach through a set of simulated home assisted living scenarios. © 2012 IEEE.

Abstract
Large scale distributed systems are typically evolving environments that have to deal with interoperability, scalability, mobility and QoS adaptability requirements. Generically, these systems need adaptation mechanisms to cope with short-term (cf. programmed reconfiguration) and long-term requirements (cf. evolutionary reconfiguration). We propose a reflective component-based framework with architecture style awareness for managing architecture composition and constraining adaptation. Specifically, this framework provides the necessary tools to generate and manipulate the programming model abstractions (i.e. components, connectors and respective properties and interfaces). The framework offers a principled way to deal with both introspection and adaptation of basic and composite components. It provides the developers with the ability to choose, extend and modify architecture style managers. These managers are responsible to represent and check architecture constraints both at development and deployment time, i.e. before any architectural reconfiguration may be committed. © 2001 IEEE.

Abstract
There is a growing interest in the area of self-healing systems. Self-healing does however impose considerable demands on system infrastructures - Especially in terms of openness and support for reconfigurability. This paper proposes that the self-awareness inherent in reflective technologies lends itself well to the construction of self-healing systems. In particular, the paper examines the support provided by the Open ORB reflective middleware technology for the construction of this increasingly important class of system.