Low Power Considerations in Ubiquitous Computing

Majority of the devices that are used in ubiquitous computing are expected to be as small as possible, be able to perform as many computations as possible, and transmit the results to another device or computer. Such expectations in performance put a pressure on the power budget of such devices. It is a well-known fact that the advances in battery technology are much slower and cannot keep up with the performance demands of tiny gadgets unless new methods of designing and managing hardware and software are developed and used. This chapter will introduce the motivation for low power design considerations by discussing the power limitations of ubiquitous computing devices. Then the chapter will discuss the research directions that are being pursued in literature for reducing power consumption and increasing efficiency of ubiquitous computing systems.

Wireless Sensor Network based Data Fusion and Control Model for an Oil Production Platform

In this chapter the authors propose methodologies for improving the efficiency of a control system in an industrial environment, specifically an oil production platform. They propose a data fusion model that consists of four steps – preprocessing, classification and association, data association and correlation association, and composite decision. The first two steps are executed at the sensor network level and the last two steps are done at the network manager or controller level. Their second proposal is a distributed hierarchical control system and network management system. Here the central idea is that the network manager and controller coordinate in order to make delays in feedback loops as well as for increasing the lifetime of the sensor network. The authors finally conclude the control system proposal by giving a controlling model using sensor networks to control the flow of hydrocarbons in an oil production platform.

Wireless Sensor Networks Advances for Ubiquitous Computing

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have considerably evolved in recent years. Their main focus has been always restricted to the extraction of information from the environment, but only data collected by the network has been considered. All internal operations and challenges encountered in achieving the requirements assigned to the data have been ignored. However, the advances in the area of WSN, allowing their operation in scenarios under different conditions, make us believe that they are sufficiently mature and optimized to solve problems in other related areas. So, considering the WSN as an ideal laboratory to find solutions to several problems in wireless networks, this Chapter discusses how the advances of these networks may be useful to help the development and creation of smart environments, essential to make ubiquitous computing part of our everyday life.

On the Design of Self-Organizing Ad Hoc Networks

Self-organization concept has become very important to the vision of pervasive and ubiquitous systems because such systems are expected to be composed by lots of interconnected computing devices immersed in the environments. In particular, general Mobile Ad hoc networks, and their specializations such as Sensor and Vehicular networks can be seen as the main technologies for pervasive infra-structures. These networks were conceived under the self-organization paradigm due to many characteristics such as a high number of devices, dynamic network topology and the need of autonomous operation. Although several mechanism and techniques for achieving self-organizing behavior are already applied, there is still the lack of general methodologies for the design of new self-organizing functions. Thus, this chapter will present an overview of self-organizing networks introducing important functions and techniques, and it will focus on important design aspects that can be useful to new designs.

XAC Project

In pervasive computing environment (Satyanarayanan, 2001), common context management system, that make context of the real world be shared among the context-aware applications, is required to reduce development cost of each context-aware applications. A wireless sensor network (WSN) will be a key infrastructure for the context management system. Towards pervasive computing, a WSN integrated into context management system should be open infrastructure. In an open WSN should (1)handle various kinds of tasks, (2)manage tasks at runtime, (3)save resource consumption, and (4)adapt to changes of environments. To develop such an open WSN, middleware supports are needed, and our XAC project tries to develop a middleware for the open WSN. The XAC project is a research project to develop a middleware for open WSN. In this chapter, the auhors show research issues related to open WSN from the viewpoints of task description language, runtime task management, self-adaptability, and security.

Managing Context Uncertainty in Smart Pervasive Environments

The essence of pervasive computing lies in the creation of smart environments saturated with computing and communication capabilities, yet gracefully integrated with human users (inhabitants). Context Awareness is perhaps the most salient feature of such an intelligent computing environment. An inhabitant’s mobility and activities play a significant role in defining his contexts in and around the home. Although there exists optimal algorithm for location and activity tracking of a single inhabitant, the correlation and dependence between multiple inhabitants’ contexts within the same environment make the location and activity tracking more challenging. In this chapter, we discuss a cooperative reinforcement learning and a non-cooperative Nash H-learning approach for location-aware resource management in multi-inhabitant smart homes that attempts to minimize the joint location uncertainty of inhabitants. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework is capable of adaptively controlling a smart environment, significantly reduces energy consumption and enhances the comfort of the inhabitants. We also present open problems in this area.

A Primer of Ubiquitous Computing Challenges and Trends

The growing availability of wireless networks and the proliferation of portable devices have made mobile computing a reality. Furthermore, the widespread use of location systems stimulates the creation of context-aware and adaptive systems. Ubiquitous computing integrates and extends these approaches through a new proposal where users’ applications are available in a suitable adapted form, wherever they go and however they move. In this scenario, issues related to development of software need to be tackled. This chapter reviews essential concepts of the ubiquitous computing area, its evolution, and challenges that must be managed. To deal with these issues, the authors describe the main requirements for the development of ubiquitous software. This analysis starts with the discussion of limitations in the use of traditional programming models, and then goes on to the proposition of techniques to address these limitations. The authors trust that this discussion can help the future development of ubiquitous applications.

Experiences in Developing Ubiquitous Applications

Ubiquitous computing aims at making our lives easier by creating smart environments that are able to adequately react according to the context, the user, and the available devices. This chapter describes a set of prototype applications developed for a wide set of ubiquitous computing environments. These applications provide solutions to improve different kinds of environments, such as academic, business, museum and hospital environments. Since wireless networks are a key component in pervasive applications, a careful selection must take place to find which one suits better the characteristics required, depending on the objective of each case. In the authors’ case studies they have mainly concentrated on IEEE 802.11 and Bluetooth technologies. The work has enabled them to translate theoretical concepts to real scenarios, while identifying specific needs in different types of ubiquitous computing applications.

Hybrid Intelligent Systems in Ubiquitous Computing

In this chapter hybrid approach to development of intelligent systems is applied to ubiquitous computing systems, in particular, to smart environment. Different classifications of Hybrid Intelligent Systems (HIS) are looking and two examples of hybrid approach for smart environment are suggested: framework based on expert system and neural network for programming of behavior of smart objects and paradigm of context-based programming-learning of behavior of intelligent agent. Besides this chapter offers an attempt to systematize concepts for development of HIS as any introduction to methodology for development of HIS is suggested. The author hopes that this chapter will be useful for researchers and developers to better understand challenges in development of ambient intelligence and possible ways to overcome them.

Disability vs. Smart Environments

This chapter discusses a novel approach to manage the human environment interaction in case of disability. It provides accessible services to the user in smart environment. This approach is based on the user limitation capabilities (“handicap situations”) in smart environment. It is built upon formalisms based on S??T(?) Description logic (DL) named Semantic Matching Framework (SMF). The architecture of SMF is designed in a way that Human-Environment Interaction (HEI) is generated online to identify and compensate the handicap situation occurring in the course of daily life activities. The SMF architecture is based on modules and implemented using semantic web technologies and integrated into a demonstrator, which has been used to validate the concept in laboratory conditions. The chapter includes the time response and the scalability analysis of SMF.