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PROCEEDINGS OF THE 5TH PROGRESS SYMPOSIUM ON EMBEDDED SYSTEMS
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
© PROGRESS/STW 2004, ISBN 90-73461-41-3 OCTOBRE 20, 2004, NBC NIEUWEGEIN, NL
1
Smart Surroundings
Paul Havinga, Pierre Jansen, Maria Lijding and Hans Scholten
Embedded Systems, University of Twente
P.O.Box 217, 7500AE Enschede, The Netherlands
{Havinga, Jansen, Scholten, Lijding}@cs.utwente.nl
Abstract—Ambient systems are networked embedded sys-
tems integrated with everyday environments and supporting
people in their activities. These systems will create a Smart
Surrounding for people to facilitate and enrich daily life and
increase productivity at work. Such systems will be quite dif-
ferent from current computer systems, as they will be based
on an unbounded set of hardware artefacts and software en-
tities, embedded in everyday objects or realized as new types
of device.
The Smart Surroundings research program is investigat-
ing a new paradigm for bringing the flexibility of informa-
tion technology to bear in every aspect of daily life. Our
approach to enable ambient systems depends on highly dis-
tributed, reliable, and secure information systems that can
evolve and adapt to radical changes in their environment,
delivering information services that adapt to the people and
the services that use them. These distributed systems must
easily and naturally integrate devices, ranging from tiny
sensors and actuators to hand-held information appliances.
Such devices will be connected primarily by short-range
wireless networks, as well as by high-bandwidth local back-
bones.
I. INTRODUCTION
The Smart Surroundings research program [1] is investi-
gating a new paradigm for bringing the flexibility of infor-
mation technology to bear in every aspect of daily life. It
foresees that people will be surrounded by deeply embed-
ded and flexibly networked systems that provide easily ac-
cessible yet unobtrusive support for an open-ended range
of activities, to enrich daily life and to increase productiv-
ity at work. This presents a paradigm shift from personal
computing to ubiquitous computing, challenging the re-
search community to investigate new building blocks and
integrated infrastructures, as well as emerging applications
and interaction styles. Relevant knowledge areas include
embedded systems, computer architecture, wireless com-
munication, distributed computing, data and knowledge
modeling, application platforms, human-computer inter-
action, industrial design, as well as application research
in different settings and sectors.
The project brings together a critical mass of researchers
from very active and high profile research groups in the
field, from universities (Univeristy of Twente, Technical
University of Delft), research institutes (CTIT, TNO), ma-
jor industries (Philips, Nedap, Thales), SMEs (Utellus,
TalkingHOME), and users (Roessingh R&D, Philips, Oce
Technologies) thereby collecting leading expertise cur-
rently present in the Netherlands. The consortium fur-
ther draws on complementary expertise from participa-
tion of research groups from the UK and Germany (Lan-
caster University, University of Karlsruhe). The project
has started in April 2004 and will run for 4 and a half years.
II. BACKGROUND
From a scientific perspective, Smart Surroundings is
centered around the idea of ubiquitous computing which
was first articulated by Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC in
his 1991 seminal article on the computer for the 21st cen-
tury[5]. We will briefly introduce this background and the
scientific state of the art of ubiquitous computing.
For a complete overview it is important to realize that
the progressing embedded systems technology is the key
technology toward a ubiquitous computing realization of
Smart Surroundings. We will therefore provide an analysis
of development trends in embedded systems.
Finally we will analyze how ambient systems funda-
mentally differ from established distributed and interactive
systems. We will emphasize the requirement for funda-
mental research of architectures for ubiquitous computing
and Smart Surroundings.
A. Ubiquitous Computing
The notion of Ubiquitous Computing was introduced by
the late Mark Weiser (1952 - 1999) to describe a new era
of computing that would progress beyond personal com-
puting by moving computing into everyday environments
on the basis of large numbers of networked embedded de-
vices. The key motivation for the vision was to find new
ways for people to interact with computers in ways that
unlike state of the art personal computing would not be
isolated (unaware) and isolating (monopolizing attention)
from the overall situation. Weiser referred to this ideal also
as ”the calm technology, that recedes into the background
of our lives” much like electricity does.
The vision has since found closely related articulations,
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PROCEEDINGS OF THE 5TH PROGRESS SYMPOSIUM ON EMBEDDED SYSTEMS
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
© PROGRESS/STW 2004, ISBN 90-73461-41-3 OCTOBRE 20, 2004, NBC NIEUWEGEIN, NL
2
including pervasive computing (popularized by IBM, em-
phasizing the technology perspective), invisible computing
(introduced by Don Norman[4], emphasizing user expe-
rience) and ambient intelligence (introduced by ISTAG ,
human-centred with strong AI influence).
During the Nineties the research program began slowly
to investigate Weiser’s indications. Most important en-
abling technologies that have emerged are wireless net-
working, location technologies, and inexpensive embed-
ded systems, especially low-cost sensors. Around these
developments a coherent ubiquitous computing research
community has begun to form, drawing from distributed
systems, mobile computing and human-computer interac-
tion research, however notably failing to engage leading
edge embedded systems research. In contrast, in Smart
Surroundings embedded systems research is prominent.
A recent review of 10 year’s research following Weiser’s
original idea further revealed that many enabling technolo-
gies have come in place while practically no progress was
made on integration. We address this with on many lev-
els in the proposed research, for instance with integration
of different wireless networks and integration of tools and
methods in a coherent development framework.
The analysis of state of the art ubiquitous computing
projects further highlights that resource limitations and
energy-efficiency have become central concerns in the de-
sign of new infrastructures and devices. The divergent
growth of technologies means that processing and com-
munication can be embedded in practically everything now
while progress on batteries and energy harvesting can not
keep pace In our proposed work we give emphasis to rad-
ically new approaches toward energy-efficient system de-
sign.
Recently, we have seen major progress in developing
the new off-the-desktop computing paradigm that moves
towards the notion of a pervasive, wearable, unobtrusive,
disappearing, or invisible computer. The ubiquitous com-
puting research community at large has been very success-
ful in building illustrative prototypes and exploring the de-
sign opportunities for novel applications [2]. This work
is compelling but has remained centered around single de-
vices as opposed to dynamic distributed systems composed
of many devices. Although there has been a range of in-
stances of prototype systems that have been built, there is
little commonality across them and there are still very few
supporting tools to help in the development of particular
systems.
For example, processing and interaction can now be
built into practically everything to create smart objects,
but we lack the technology to integrate these in ways
that would support an open-ended range of applications.
Current components are very advanced, but integration to
open systems is not well understood and certainly not sup-
ported. At protocol level, link level protocols are in place,
but we lack protocols for spontaneous interoperation that
are specifically geared for embedded systems and energy-
efficiency. Likewise, building blocks are in place to con-
struct dedicated prototypes to explore application ideas,
but we lack the foundations for studying, benchmarking,
and comparing of systems and application designs. The
application experiments performed so far, are relatively
sheltered, we lack experiments in which the system is ex-
posed to settings that involve competing users, devices and
applications.
These examples show that we can still observe a very
wide gap between the new design materials at hand (tiny
processors, radios, sensors, etc) and their potential appli-
cations. Moreover, there is no consensus on a set of under-
lying frameworks and architectures that will enable a range
of applications to be built in a range of future settings.
Within Smart Surroundings we will address all these is-
sues, and will lay the foundations to bridge the gap. The
development of architectures and supporting frameworks
is at the core of this project. At the same time, surround-
ing this core activity there are a number of tasks on the de-
velopment of scenarios, on studying people’s everyday set-
tings, on prototyping and on evaluation. Thus, the develop-
ment of architectures and conceptual frameworks will be
done in close interaction with practical implementations,
demonstrators and experiments.
B. Embedded Systems
The rapid development of information and communi-
cation technology has enabled the realization of smaller,
lighter, and faster computer-based facilities and systems
than before. Today 98 percent of all microprocessors are
used elsewhere than in ordinary personal computers. The
expansion of the use of computer-based products can be
compared with the introduction of electrical motors in the
20th century, but with wider and deeper effects. Devel-
opment trends in embedded systems will be defining for
further directions toward realization of future Smart Sur-
roundings. A general trend is that embedded systems will
increasingly embody intelligent behaviour for the benefit
of the embedding system and/or the user [3].
With the increasing deployment of embedded systems
in ever smaller area networks, as for instance offices and
malls, homes, rooms, body areas, the interactivecommuni-
cation will dominate the architecture. At the introduction
of short-range wireless connectivity, the embedded func-
tion will not enforce the physical shape for the product
anymore; form and function become separated, and indus-
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© PROGRESS/STW 2004, ISBN 90-73461-41-3 OCTOBRE 20, 2004, NBC NIEUWEGEIN, NL
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trial design will find new degrees of freedom.
Intelligent user interfaces will be the dominating factor
for deployment of embedded systems. While we currently
have to limit ourselves to the keyboard as input, speech and
sound recognition will become increasingly used to com-
municate with ambient systems. Processing is involved in
getting from recognition of simple commands to the recog-
nition of speech in a natural language. Friendly user inter-
faces are paramount for elderly or disabled people to ac-
cess ambient systems. In the audio domain processing will
be involved for the interpretation of sounds; reliable sound
recognition is the ultimate target.
C. Architectures
Ambient systems typically augment embedded ubiqui-
tous computing infrastructures. They fundamentally chal-
lenge accepted approaches for developing computing, net-
working and interaction environments. Consider, for ex-
ample, the following observations [FET - Proactive Initia-
tive 2000, ”The Disappearing Computer”, Presentation of
the Initiative]:
•ambient systems are designed to become one with phys-
ical settings in which they operate - fundamentally chal-
lenging the tenet of location transparency.
•they cannot make assumptions about the supporting in-
frastructure in its dynamically changing physical settings -
this is challenging the end-to-end argument.
•ambient systems must deal with devices that may be
purposefully designed to operate with limited resources
(power, memory, etc.) - challenging the expectation that
everything will be always online and consistently respon-
sive.
•ambient systems will realize emerging intelligent behav-
ior by collective perception of many distributed sensors
and devices - thus challenging the expectation that the en-
vironment is known and homogeneous, and can be pre-
dicted.
•they will integrate devices and entities in unexpected
configurations, which may lead to interference at the log-
ical as well as the physical level - thus requiring that they
anticipate these configurations and resolve possible con-
flicts.
•ambient systems must be dependable and secure for peo-
ple to be able to have trust, much in the same way as you
trust your home to provide comfort and security, but are
also meant to be open and highly dynamic - thus challeng-
ing the ways in which we handle security in computer sys-
tems.
To be able to meet these and other challenges, ambi-
ent systems require a radical revision of the underlying as-
sumptions of systems architectures.
III. RESEARCH
The principal aim of the Smart Surroundings project is
to overcome the ad hoc nature of investigations into ubiq-
uitous computing environments, and to develop a sound
foundation for Smart Surroundings both in terms of build-
ing the required infrastructure and platforms, and of under-
standing the emerging applications and interaction models.
A. Key objectives
More specifically, our research is guided by the follow-
ing set of key objectives:
•To develop an open platform for ubiquitous computing
systems that integrates the required infrastructure compo-
nents and provides an extensible set of universally instal-
lable tools, devices, and services for the developers, oper-
ators and users of Smart Surroundings. The platform de-
velopment will be driven with an engineering ethos of pro-
viding solutions that are practical and sustainable in the
face of real world, and effective in reducing the cost for
development and installation. Our ambition is to establish
this platform as a standard for research and development
of ubiquitous computing environments.
•To lay the foundations for understanding the conceptual
frameworks, models and notations needed to describe the
structure and behavior of system components from a va-
riety of research perspectives. The work on these foun-
dations is aimed to overcome the current ad hoc nature
of designs and evaluations. The expected result is a set
of fundamental models and frameworks that will support
evaluation and comparison of designs and systems.
•To study ubiquitous computing in concrete and com-
plex settings to ensure that development of platforms and
foundations remains firmly grounded in reality. The con-
crete settings will investigate ambient system environ-
ments ranging from small and dense to large and sparse,
and from digitally well provisioned to digitally impover-
ished. The scenarios explored in these settings will not be
focused on selected applications as such but on the com-
plex situations that arise from interaction of diverse stake-
holders with many different threads of activity. Our target
is to design and implement real world experiments to the
challenge of supporting a multitude of competing applica-
tions and user experiences.
B. Challenges
To scope our research we will concentrate on a set of
core challenges that we consider most important for the
realization of Smart Surroundings. The core challenges
that we identify are:
•Energy-efficiency. Progress in battery technology and
energy harvesting falls behind the much faster progress in
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© PROGRESS/STW 2004, ISBN 90-73461-41-3 OCTOBRE 20, 2004, NBC NIEUWEGEIN, NL
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embedded components - this requires reconsideration of
systems architectures to better address the need for energy-
efficiency.
•Embedded Networking. Embedded devices vary largely
in their wireless communication requirements and there-
fore interoperability across different technologies needs to
be investigated. In addition there is still a need for new
protocols that meet the requirements of very low-power
and low-resource embedded devices.
•Competition. Experimental ubiquitous computing envi-
ronments typically support a very small number of ’as-
sumed to be friendly’ applications but future ambient sys-
tems will only be viable if they support many diverse ap-
plications executing on behalf of different users with po-
tentially competing and conflicting interests. Users, ap-
plications and devices will compete for scarce resources
in a dynamic heterogeneous environment, posing resource
management challenges at a new scale of complexity.
•Adaptability. The sheer number of entities that make
up ambient systems implies that access to resources will
be extremely competitive. Hence, ambient systems will
have to embody adaptability on an entirely new scale. For
example, communication will need to become adaptive to
sustain high densities of devices, and computations may
need to split and migrate to adapt to available energy and
communication.
•Sense-making. As computing recedes into the back-
ground, the issue of sense-making becomes a fundamental
challenge from two different perspectives: how can sys-
tems make sense of user activity to provide ambient intel-
ligence, and how can users make sense environments that
are characterized by dynamic and spontaneous composi-
tion of services.
•Security and privacy. Ambient systems will have to em-
brace notions that will respect human freedom and iden-
tity. Systems should be designed to empower and support
people in their activities, but in ways that would avoid the
control or manipulation of non-authorized others. These
considerations include a range of aspects from personal
privacy thorough to ”system trust”. From a research per-
spective, this places the challenge of trying to embody
such principles into the design at different levels.
•Integrated development. Ubiquitous computing systems
and applications are developed ad hoc as we lack the ab-
stractions, tools, methods and development frameworks re-
quired to easily integrate infrastructure components.
•Supporting varying settings. Smart Surroundings need
to function coherently and hence it will be important to
focus design and system support on entire settings (as op-
posed to applications). Mobile and wearable systems need
to consider large variation as the move between settings,
which may range from digitally rich to digitally impover-
ished.
•Architecture and Foundations. The most fundamental
challenge for Smart Surroundings is to identify the overall
architecture that will be underpinning the future ambient
systems. Conceptual frameworks are needed to capture de-
sign knowledge and to support evaluation and comparison
of systems.
C. Approach
The general research approach we take is necessarily
multidisciplinary as many of the identified challenges need
to be addressed in an inclusive way that considers systems,
environment and user in close correspondence. We give
equal weighting to bottom-up technology-driven work on
an integrated infrastructure for Smart Surroundings, and
to top-down design- and user-led research on application
settings. We specifically seek to explore systems in real
world use already in early project stages: this will be fa-
cilitated by the systems and technologies that we bring as
background to this effort.
The particular scientific methods to be used will range
from mathematical modeling (e.g. for resource optimiza-
tion problems), simulation (e.g. of network protocols),
hardware/software prototyping (e.g. of smart devices), and
system measurements to scenario design, contextual anal-
ysis, user studies and system evaluation in situ.
The Smart Surroundings partnership anticipates to gen-
erate leading edge technologies and knowledge to advance
of ubiquitous computing. The following list is indicative
of the innovations that we foresee at this stage: we strictly
understand this as baseline to describe our ambition but ex-
pect to find and develop further innovation potentials that
will emerge from collaborative research as we progress.
•Cross-layer and cross-device optimisation for energy
efficiency - Ambient systems may be one of the best exam-
ples in which this pervasiveness of energy efficient design
criteria is desirable, due to the inherent resource limita-
tion, which makes energy the most valuable resource. In
traditional networks, functionalities are often separated by
assigning them to different layers in the protocol stack. A
common practice is to try and optimise layers individually
in order to implement as efficiently as possible the func-
tionalities assigned to each one of them. An opportunity
which should be exploited is the possibility to jointly op-
timise adjacent layers (and, ultimately, the whole protocol
stack) in such a way as to make the resulting cross-layer
optimisation significantly better than what can be achieved
by working on single layers.
•Resource management in heterogeneous wireless net-
works - To enable the provision of optimized seamless ser-
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vices, co-operation of networks is inevitable. However,
this requires mechanisms for efficient resource allocation
(e.g. by a common resource management) and optimized
usage of available bandwidth. Scheduling techniques will
be proposed such that the system can efficiently provide
the services needed. Optimization issues and methods play
a crucial role in order to achieve an appropriate quality in
heterogeneous wireless networks. E.g. resource manage-
ment and allocation as well as clustering ask for fast and
efficient approaches. These approaches have to take care
of various aspects like the heterogeneity of the network,
the mobility, the transmission range, the scarce resources,
and the online environment.
•Collaborative communities - Ad-hoc networking will
be one of the major enablers to an architecture and under-
lying framework for ambient systems. Ad-hoc networks
utilizing wireless technology are considered as a means of
communications among embedded devices that temporar-
ily meet, where distance and time come close yet easy
connection to a network infrastructure is not easily pos-
sible. Smart Surroundings is advancing this concept of
ad-hoc networks and proposes a community network in
order to use such networks in ad-hoc communities, which
are formed between an unspecified number of devices tem-
porarily assembled with a common purpose.
•Autonomous dependable distributed systems - One of
the major requirements for meaningful applications with
deeply embedded networks is that these networks should
be dependable and trusted. Wireless networks are fun-
damentally different from their well-studied cousins due
to the absence of online servers, and the design con-
straints on processing and communication. Innovation
within Smart Surroundings involves the concept of au-
tonomous dependable systems of communicating commu-
nities to solve these problems.
•Protocols for embedded networking - We envision that
Smart Surroundings will depend on integration of very
low-power and low-resource embedded devices that will
provide services in spontaneously assembled communi-
ties. The existing protocols for ad hoc networking and
spontaneous interoperation do not sufficiently address re-
source limitations and induce overhead by centralizing net-
work control in e.g. a master node. We will design and im-
plement protocols that support decentralized mechanisms
for neighborhood detection, addressing and routing.
•Wireless infrastructure and mobility - The integration
of an ad-hoc component into wireless infrastructures will
be one of the major results. Enabling mobility requires ad-
vances in (horizontal and vertical) roaming, handover deci-
sion mechanisms, location detection, and mechanisms for
mobility and location prediction. Suitable mechanisms for
mobility management will be required to enable vertical
roaming and to enable integration of different access tech-
nologies into a common (yet heterogeneous) access net-
work, cross system load balancing and vertical (dynamic)
resource allocation, hence, facilitating more efficient use
of the radio spectrum.
•Wireless infrastructure and routing - Wireless links
form an important part of a personal network, which re-
sults in many gateways that can be used to connect to the
outside world. So, connecting to an external network can
be achieved by many different routes. Some intelligence
is required in the network to find optimal connections if
there is more than one possible route. Of course multiple
connections may also be used for a faster transfer, or ad-
ditional reliability. These aspects involve many choices,
tradeoffs and optimization issues.
•Toolkits for smart devices - The shift from personal
and mobile computing to ubiquitous computing is charac-
terized by a move from standard hardware to highly cus-
tomized devices developed to fit a particular application
environment. It has become a major obstacle in ubiquitous
computing research that design alternatives for smart de-
vices are cumbersome to explore as physical components
are provided only at a very low-level of abstraction. We ad-
dress by developing a hardware/software construction kit
for smart devices, comprising an extensible set of config-
urable building blocks and software frameworks for smart
device applications.
•Efficient reconfigurable processing platform - The
challenges to face in developing new technologies for em-
bedded ambient devices are the need for the devices to be
smart, self-configurable, capable of networking together,
and the inherent poverty of resources of the devices them-
selves. Devices for ambient systems need to be able to op-
erate in environments that can change drastically in short
term as well as long term in available resources and avail-
able services. Moreover, the system must configure, in-
stall, diagnose, maintain, and improve itself. Current em-
bedded systems are not able to cope well with these re-
quirements, or are far too complex or resource demanding.
In this project we will design and implement efficient re-
configurable processing platforms for ambient systems.
•Conceptual frameworks - Ubiquitous computing is
still poorly developed in terms of research discipline.
The research community lacks the conceptual tools that
would facilitate comparison and evaluation of systems. In
Smart Surroundings we will develop the conceptual mod-
els frameworks required for analysis of structure, behav-
ior and interaction in ubiquitous computing environment.
Starting points for conceptual frameworks are for instance
our notion of community interacting, and our understand-
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ing of contexts, which serves as a framework for needed
interaction and communication.
•Novel interaction models and techniques - Smart Sur-
roundings are ultimately aimed at supporting people in
daily life as well as in work situations. A key motivation
for our research (and for ubicomp at large) is to find new
ways for people to interact with computer-based services
while giving primacy to the real world. A main thrust of
our work will be aimed at innovative and embedded in-
terfaces, with particular emphasis on supporting ad hoc
composition and configuration of tangible interface com-
ponents.
•New applications and product concepts - Smart Sur-
roundings is exploring diverse settings for which we will
design, implement, demonstrate and evaluate a range of
new applications, services and user experiences. We ex-
pect that many of these will become manifest in new de-
vice designs and product concepts.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
In this project we will offer fundamental design con-
cepts for ambient systems in a ubiquitous computing en-
vironment; we will not device ad hoc solutions and at the
end expose them to the users. Therefore, we will have
parallel activities in the area of the user (settings) and en-
gineering. Within the settings we expose ambient systems
to environments with many potential conflicting applica-
tions. We will use incremental experiments, where we start
with early prototyping in a limited scenario/application;
and end with a full-scale setting in which we apply tech-
nologies, architectures, and protocols developed within the
project. Employment of existing technologies allows for
early prototyping in the early phase of the project. We will
build upon commercial technology like RFID tags, Blue-
tooth radios, and the technology, devices, and protocols as
developed within the Eyes and Smart-Its European projects
(provided by some of the consortium partners).
To facilitating efficient use of the radio spectrum a suit-
able mechanisms for mobility management and routing
will be proposed to enable vertical roaming and to enable
integration of different access technologies into a common
(yet heterogeneous) access network, cross system load bal-
ancing and vertical (dynamic) resource allocation.
REFERENCES
[1] Smart surroundings. http://smart-surroundings.org.
[2] N. Davies and H.-W. Gellersen. Beyond prototypes: Challenges in
deploying ubiquitous systems. Pervasive Computing, 1(1):26–35,
2002.
[3] L. D. Eggermont, editor. Embedded Systems Roadmap 2002. STW
Technology Foundation/PROGRESS, Utrecht, Mar. 2002.
[4] D. A. Norman. The invisible computer : why good products can
fail, the personal computer is so complex, and information appli-
ances are the solution. MIT press, Cambridge, MA, 1998.
[5] M. Weiser. The computer for the twenty-first century. Scientific
American, pages 94–104, Sept. 1991.
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