Trinity College Dublin

Pervasive computing environments are commonly regarded as being made up of a multitude of autonomous elements collaborating to sense and respond to a user’s requirements and the context of the task-at-hand. The management of pervasive computing environments therefore requires runtime understanding of a user’s task requirements and operational context, the state of resources available to support the user’s tasks as well as the broader management policies that also govern those resources. At the same time, the dynamic, ad hoc nature of pervasive computing environments requires an integrated, context-aware and self-organizing approach to their management. Autonomic systems self-manage their configuration, performance and integrity based on high-level goals set by users and administrators, and are therefore are well suited to the management of pervasive computing environment.

In this project, KDEG addresses how management of pervasive computing must balance the need to hide the complexities of adaptive service operation, while at the same time providing suitable levers of control and windows of inspection through which users can maintain a sense of ownership over adaptive service behaviour. With a system offering highly adaptive services to users, the management task of enforcing responsibilities over resources is essentially one of constraining the range of adaptivity the system can exhibit in different situations. These constraints must themselves adapt to a heterogeneous, ever-changing set of resources, that will be difficult to determine a priori. The work in this project focuses on: seamless interoperability amidst a high level of organisation heterogeneity at development time and runtime; service composition as the primary adaptive mechanism; satisfy management goals using policy-based management and supporting the needs of users both as individuals and as collaborative communities. Experimentation has involved some use of sensor and actuation systems, but has been effectively accelerated by the development of a 3D, multi-user simulator of smart spaces.

This project addresses the problem of deploying and managing a global semantic event network, over which event messages are efficiently routed from producers to consumers based on the meaning of their content. It aims to allow novel networking features to be added incrementally, such as the routing based on the trust that consumers place in producers or the similarity, rather than matching, of the meaning of messages to the interest of the consumer. This is delivered within a flexible management framework that enables incremental roll-out and encourages innovation.

The approach taken is to develop an open, extensible control plane for a global event service, based on semantically rich messages. This will be achieved by the novel application of control plane separation and semantic-based matching to Content-Based Networks. However, the primary benefits derive from exploiting peer-clustering techniques for distributed ontology queries to achieve efficient aggregation of semantic queries. The clustering of super-peers using decentralised policy engineering delivers the incremental deployment of new peer-clustering strategies. This will be demonstrated by implementing trust-awareness and semantic interoperability in a composite routing control scheme.

ACCA is a collaborative project aiming at outlining the scope of an emerging communication paradigm – autonomic communication in application to various aspects of communication and from viewpoints of different stakeholders. The vision is that of a world pervaded by ubiquitous communication facilities, offering their services to the users and capable of self-organizing and self-preserving their functionalities without any direct human intervention. This entails fundamental advances both in the architecture and functionality of the network, and in the characterization and understanding of the common communication medium.

KDEG’s contribution has been in roadmapping research in the following:

This project is developing a platform for the user-centred design and evaluation of adaptive, context-aware services for the wireless, mobile and pervasive computing markets. The platform is an integrated set of tools that allows models of adaptive service behaviour to be captured and used to evaluate the user’s experience in using the implemented service in different contexts. The platform uses a 3D virtual reality environment to deliver repeatable, instrumented, context-dependent evaluations. Service developers will benefit from reduced development costs and more effective user-empowering services. Initially we plan commercialisation to target the location aware service development market.

KDEG’s contribution focusses on the user-centred design and testing of context-aware adaptive services. It is innovative in applying a semantic model-driven approach to the tight integration of the rapid prototyping of adaptive service behaviour and the efficient evaluation of its usability. This approach is novel in directly aiming to reduce the cost and improving the accuracy of user-centred evaluation of adaptive services by the easy configuration of simulations of a wide range of real-world settings for user invocation of the services, e.g. indoor and outdoor, single user and collaborative, ad hoc or structured, cellular or WLAN access etc. As adaptive services exhibit a range of behaviour, the aim is not to verify the correctness of system behaviour but to verify that it operates within a well defined behavioural envelope given for specific regions of the possible context space that corresponds to the overall testing goals.