Dynamic Ambient Networks with Middleware

Ambient Intelligence is the concept that technology will become a part of everyday living and assist users in multiple tasks. It is a combination and further development of ubiquitous computation, pervasive computation, and multimedia.The technology is sensitive to the actions of humans and it can interact with the human or adjust the surroundings to suit the needs of the users dynamically. All of this is made possible by embedding sensors and computing components inconspicuously into human surroundings. This paper discusses the middleware needed for dynamic ambient intelligence networks and the ambient intelligence network architecture. The bottom-up middleware approach for ambient intelligence is important so the lower layers of all ambient intelligence networks are interchangeable and compatible with other ambient intelligence components. This approach also allows components to be programmed to be compatible with multiple ambient intelligence networks. The network architecture discussed in this paper allows for dynamic networking capabilities for minimal interruptions with changes in computer components.

Ambient Networks

This chapter introduces the Ambient Network (AN) which is a network integration solution that aims at fostering dynamic co-operation between the next generation, heterogeneous wireless and wired networks, in order to gather resources within and across networks to provide new services to end users. First, it depicts the main characteristics of AN before describing the Ambient Control Space, which is the space where functional entities managing the networks and the services are active, and the interfaces. Then it focuses on the SATO (Service-aware Adaptive Transport Overlays), which is a service overlay networks deployed on top of the underlying heterogeneous physical networks and tailored according to the services‘ requirements and users‘ context. This chapter aims at giving the readers a good overview of what Ambient networks are since they will be present in the next years everywhere.