BACKGROUND

The ubiquitous computing vision has inspired early research into computing systems and applications over the last 10 years. They become pervasively embedded in our everyday environments, and bring the unique flexibility of digital technology to the activities around which our lives evolve. Components of such a smart environment are small nodes with sensing and wireless communications capabilities, able to organize flexibly into a network for data collection and delivery. Although nodes will be equipped with a power supply (battery) and embedded processor that makes them autonomous and self-aware, their functionality and capabilities will be very limited. Therefore, efficient operation and collaboration between nodes is essential to deliver smart services in a ubiquitous setting.

Ambient systems will be quite different from current distributed systems.  This is due the combination of limiting properties of these systems such as (1) the communication facilities, which are based on ad hoc wireless communication where nodes can move or fail, (2) the limitation of available resources in particular energy, physical volume, processing power and memory, (3) the way in which data is represented in such a system: it is not stored central but merely available in the distributed nodes, and (4) the desired characteristics to which such a ambient environment must adhere, such as to  provide efficient, self-organizing, unobtrusive and reliable support for an open-ended range of activities. 

Current work in this field has revealed that there is an increasing need for distributed systems support that fit mobile ambient systems. In this project we investigate new feather-light distributed mechanisms for networking and distributed collaboration, and evaluate their feasibility through experimentation. These algorithms will be essential for building self-organizing and collaborative ambient systems that show emergent behaviour and can operate in a challenging environment where nodes move, fail, and energy is a scarce resource.

The Feather-light research plan will investigate new possibilities of ambient computing and will improve the already existing ones. It will bring new paradigms for flexible information exchange and cooperation between spatially distributed nodes by distributed sensing, dissemination and execution of information by node communication based on radio techniques and node processing.