wearITwork: 4'5' December 2002, Bremen

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CONTEXT AWARE SERVICES AS A STEP TO PERVASIVE
COMPUTINGM. E. Anagnostou, E. D. SykasICCS,
Institute of Communication and Computer Systems,
Computer Networks Lab, Athens, Greece
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Pervasive computing,alias ambient
intelligence

• Pervasive computing is an environment where
  people interact with various companion, embedded,
  or invisible computers
• the creation of environments saturated with
  computing and communication capability, yet
  gracefully integrated with human users
• Ambient intelligence involves advances in a
  number of key areas, including sensors,
  interfaces, smart spaces, distributed and
  embedded computing technologies, service
  intelligence, and security.

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The mobile computing field involves

• Mobile networking, which includes protocols and
  techniques for improving the performance of
  wireless networks.
• Mobile information access.
• Support for adaptive application, including
  adaptive resource management.
• System level energy saving techniques.
• Location sensitivity.

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PC goes beyond MC by adding

• Effective use of smart spaces and devices
• Invisibility and proactivity (a) Minimal human
  intervention and (b) Meets conscious or even
  subconscious human expectations.
• Localised scalability Volume of a terminal
  interaction with the local environment decreases
  as the distance between the terminal and the
  aforementioned environment increases.
• Masking uneven conditioning (a) Different
  environments will provide different capabilities,
  (b) even the poorer environment should try to
  compensate for its deficiencies.

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Management issues for a pervasive computing
environment include

• Dynamic configuration and autoconfiguration over
  entire networks or even dynamic topologies.
• User registration, authentication, personal
  profile maintenance.
• User location handling.
• Network and terminal resource optimisation.
• Monitoring for QoS provision.

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Transition to ambient intelligence
involves the following currently available
technologies

• Wireless technology,
• intelligent and context aware service creation,
• active networks.

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Context aware services A scenario

• Car tyre accident (gradual deflation).
• Next repair facility located 10 km away.
• Car foreseen (by the onboard intelligent system)
  to safely arrive at the repair facility.
• Intelligent management system
• arranges repair appointment,
• produces warning towards driver,
• re-calculates arrival time,
• outputs the result to passengers calendars.
• Passenger calendar
• notifies hotel reception,
• postpones appointments

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Tyre pressure sensor
Periodic pressure measurements
Safety control diagnostics system
Problem typeloss of tyre pressure, time margin
Solutions module
Can go to repair facilitywithin time margin?
Solution accepted
Navigation module
New arrival time
Warning andinstructions to driver
Passenger calendars
New arrival time
Man-machine interface
Hotel reception
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Context awareness may include

• Calendar,
• user location,
• weather,
• personal preferences,
• permission profiles,
• other services offered to the same person,
• other persons in the same area.

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Context aware service provisioning involves
(Source IST project CONTEXT)

• Mechanisms for the definition, exchange and
  acquisition of contextual information.
• Mechanisms for creating and provisioning context
  sensitive services.
• A policy-based framework for service activation,
  including configuration of the relevant servers.
• The enforcement of monitoring policies for SLA
  management.

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In the Active Application Layer domain the
CONTEXT aims

• to enhance active network technology in order to
  provide efficient delivery of context based
  services especially in the mobile network
  environment.
• to the specification and development of APIs, for
  network programmability purposes, that allow the
  following functionality
• to enable a Policy-based active node management
• to get information from the data plain (packet)
  and also from the management plane as needed by
  the service

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In the IPv6 domain, CONTEXT aims

• to identify the functionality needed at the IP
  domain in order to allow the efficient delivery
  of context based services,
• to specify and develop an API to allow the
  programming of the behaviour of the IPv6 network
  elements.

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The role of wearables in pervasive computing

• In contrast with todays design philosophy of a
  general purpose machine, Weisers view was that
  ambient intelligence will provide support to
  users in an unobtrusive manner by using
  terminals, which conform to specific purposes.
• Obviously the places to hide fixed terminals
  are walls and other fixed objects, while mobile
  terminals can be hidden in clothes and movable
  objects.

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The role of wearables in context information
collection

• Wearables are well suited to collect context
  information regarding a mobile users location,
  movement, health condition, and other status
  data.
• The intelligent processing of the wealth of
  information produced by wearables and other
  ambient intelligence will be a major challenge.
• Examples (1) To process location information
  from mobile phones in order to produce road
  traffic information in a crowded city
  environment. (2) To track the movement of smart
  coffee cups and conclude the existence of a
  meeting.

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The synergy between context awareness, wearables,
and a programmable infrastructure

• Wearables can be ideal context data collectors.
• Wearable-to-human interface and wearable
  functionality can benefit from using context.
• Wearables could make use of a context aware
  service creation and provision platform, which
  would relieve them from context processing load.
• Application quality and deployment on wearables
  can be improved over programmable networks.