ABOUT:
Future
e-Science and e-Health applications will involve mobile users, possibly
with on-body sensors interacting with a ubiquitous computing environment
which detects their activity, current context and adapts accordingly.
However, the promise of such ubiquitous computing environments will
not be realised unless these systems can effectively "disappear";
and for this they need to become autonomous by managing their own evolution
and configuration changes without explicit user or administrator action.
This project will develop the architecture, tools and techniques which
permit these environments to become self-managing. To provide self-management
at varying levels (for individual devices, for simple body-area or home-area
networks, as well as large-scale network infrastructures) we advocate
the concept of a self-managed cell (SMC) as the basic architectural
pattern at both local and integrated levels. We will define, prototype
and evaluate architectures based on the SMC pattern and their use in
e-Health applications. To this end we will: define and implement the
core SMC pattern in terms of the monitoring, service-discovery, context
and policy-control services required for basic adaptation mechanisms,
investigate how SMCs can be dynamically structured into larger structures
and specialise SMCs and their interactions for two e-Health application
scenarios.
