Pervasive Computing: A Management Challenge

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Pervasive ComputingA Management Challenge

• Morris Sloman
• Imperial College London, Department of Computing
• m.sloman_at_doc.ic.ac.uk
• www.doc.ic.ac.uk/mss

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Contents

• What is pervasive computing
• Current Technology
• Design issues
• Pervasive Computing Applications
• Management issues

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What is Pervasive Computing?

• Pervasive, Ubiquitous, Sentient
• Technology View
• Computers everywhere embedded into fridges,
  washing machines, door locks, cars, furniture,
  plants, animals, people
• ? smart environments
• Mobile portable computing devices
• Wireless communication
• User View
• Invisible implicit interaction with your
  environment
• Augmenting human abilities in performance of
  tasks

FThe Computer of the 21st Century, Mark Weiser,
1991, Scientific American
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Smart Environments

• Lights, air conditioning, TV automatically switch
  on and off when you enter or leave rooms
• Sit on your favourite chair and TV switches on to
  the program you usually watch at this time of the
  day
• Use communicator/pda for phone, remote control,
  keys payments, passport, health records,
  authenticator.
• Route input from virtual keyboard to nearest
  suitable display.
• Automatic detection of new items to control and
  physical layout in a room or office.

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Smart Environment?
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Current Technology
Bluetooth Handsfree
Softphone www.eleksen.com
PDA/mobile phone
Phone/camera
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Current Technology 2
F http//matchbox.stanford.edu/cebit.html http//
www-ccs.cs.umass.edu/shri/iPic.html
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Wearable I/O
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Wearable I/O
Sony Glasstron
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Designer Gear
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Wearable or luggable?
F http//wearables.www.media.mit.edu/projects/wear
ables/mithril/index.html
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Smart Dust

• Autonomous sensing and communication in a cubic
  millimeter dust motes
• Sensors for temperature, humidity, light, motion
  .With bidirectional radio or laser battery
• Costs soon lt 1
• Typical Applications
• Defence related battlefield sensors, motion
  detectors etc.
• Inventory control on boxes which communicate with
  crates, trucks, plane etc to tell you where they
  are
• Product quality monitoring vibration, humidity,
  overheating
• Car component monitoring

F http//robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/pister/SmartD
ust/
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Commercial Motes

• Processor 4MHz, 8bit CPU
• Memory Prog RAM Memory (128 KB), Data RAM
  (4KB) On-Board Flash (512 KB)
• Radio 916 Mhz, 52K bps (150-300m max range)
• Antenna On-board, optional external
• OS TinyOS from Berkeley
• Battery 2xAA, coin cell (sleep often, sleep deep)

http//www.xbow.com
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Wireless Communication

• Bandwidth Shortage reuse techniques
• Heterogeneity Zigbee, Bluetooth, GSM/GPRS, 3G,
  IEEE 802.11 a, b g
• Multimode hardware seamless handover
• Low power protocol techniques
• Emphasis on IP protocols?

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On the Horizon

• Intelligent paper with integrated radio -replace
  current displays
• Smart paint monitors vibrations and detect
  intruders or changes colour to react to
  temperature, lighting etc.
• Intelligent glass can filter sunlight, become
  opaque - no need for curtains
• Smart garments or injectable sensors for people
  monitoring
• Printable batterieshttp//www.usatoday.com/life/c
  yber/tech/review/2001-02-12-batteries.htm
• Etc., Etc.,....

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On the Distant Horizon

• Nano, bio computers
• Self organising and self configuring
• Coherent behaviour from vast numbers of
  unreliable sensors, actuators and comms. devices
• Need new techniques for interaction maybe based
  on biological organisms?
• Exponential Growth

94,023 billions per mm2
By 2100
425,352,958,651,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000Bi
llions of computers
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Contents

• What is pervasive computing
• Current Technology
• Design issues
• Useability
• Context awareness
• Ad-hoc networking
• Pervasive Computing Applications
• Management issues

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User View

• Invisible implicit interaction with your
  environment
• Augmenting human abilities in context of tasks
• gt 100K computers per person!
• Ubiquitous/Pervasive mobile computing
  intelligent environment

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Usability

• Common user interface for workstation and mobile
  device applications
• Adaptive information display
• Replicate characteristics of paper-based
  notebooks for annotatability, robustness,
  universality
• Flexible voice based inputoutput
• Voice recognition text to speech conversion
• Gesture recognition
• Remove human from loop intelligent agents?

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Context Awareness

• Context defined by
• Current location Need location detection eg GPS
  or base stationIndoors sonic or ultrawideband
  wireless tags ? 10cm
• User activity Walking, driving a car, running
  for a bus how to detect this?
• Ambient environmentIn theatre, alone, in meeting
• Device capabilitiesScreen, input, processing
  power, battery life .
• Current QoS availability particularly for radio
  links
• Fusion of information from multiple sources

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Context Adaptation
Server

• What Compression, filtering, device-specific
  transformations, information selection ..
• Where Server, proxy or client?
• Proxy ? client and server do not change

Proxy
F http//swig.stanford.edu/fox/
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Map Adaptation
Rich dynamic data, Structured data metadata
User context based selection,Activity deadlines

• Elements river, road, motorway, buildings
• Variants scale, feature detail, date
• Dynamic data road conditions, weather

F http//www.doc.ic.ac.uk/dc/
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Information Relevance
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Clutter Reduction
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Ad-hoc networking

• Networking with no fixed infrastructure
• Use other devices as routers
• But, security concerns and usage of scarce
  battery power for relaying possibly more suited
  to sensor than user networks

F http//tonnant.itd.nrl.navy.mil/manet/manet_home
.html
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Ad-hoc Communities

• Virtual organisations e.g. Military
  battlefield, disaster teams, meetings,healthcare
  providers, games
• Dynamic groupings of users or components
• Dynamic sensor networks.
• Role based group management
• Resource and service discovery
• Problems of trust and authentication

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Contents

• What is pervasive computing
• Current Technology
• Design issues
• Pervasive Computing Applications
• Ubiquitous Healthcare
• Sensor Networks
• Management issues

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Ubiquitous Community CareHealthcare Everywhere

• Applications
• Automated monitoring
• Implanted devices
• Smart clothing
• Swallow/inject intelligent sensors and actuators
• Health advisor

• Benefits
• High ?lower risk monitoring
• Mobility for chronically ill
• Greater out-of-hospital patient management
• Mass data analysis
• Emergency feedback or response

Wireless video camera pill
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UbiCare Centre

• Ubiquitous Computing for Healthcare in the
  Communitywww.ubicare.org
• Management of patients with chronic disease or
  elderly patients during normal home, work
  outdoor activity
• Move healthcare from acute care environment to
  normal living environment
• Enable widespread collection of data to aid
  predictive medicine
• Develop infrastructure support for
  self-organising, self-configuring and
  self-healing adaptive architectures for
  large-scale ubiquitous computing

F http//www.ubicare.org
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UbiMon Objectives

• Ubiquitous Monitoring Environment for Wearable
  and Implantable Sensors
• Development of micro powered wireless medical
  sensors.
• Wearable communicator performing multi-sensor
  interfacing for both on-body and implantable
  sensors.
• Integration of multi-sensory data to determine
  both medical condition and current context.
• Detection of episodic cardiac abnormalities
• Infrastructure for large scale monitoring to
  determine trends for prediction of problems

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UbiMon the partners
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UbiMon Products

• Micropower wireless sensors
• Portable communicator for medical monitoring and
  interaction
• Adaptive cardiac abnormality detection strategies
  for an individual
• Cardiac problem prediction techniques for
  analysis of large-scale monitored data.

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UbiCare Architecture
Body sensors communicator
Analysis, filtering, logging
Environment Sensors
Monitoring strategy, Medical advice
Medical Monitoring Service
Network storage processing, decision support
agents
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Wireless Sensor Networks
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Earthquake Monitoring

• 38 strong-motion seismometers in 17-story
  steel-frame Factor Building.
• 100 free-field seismometers in UCLA campus
  ground at 100-m spacing

??¾¾¾¾¾¾ 1 km ¾¾¾¾¾¾?
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Contents

• What is pervasive computing
• Current Technology
• Design issues
• Pervasive Computing Applications
• Management Issues
• Information Power Management
• Management Architecture
• Autonomic Management
• Security Trust
• Policy

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Management the nightmare!

• Huge, complex systems
• Billions of processors
• Multiple organisations
• Managing physical world, controlling sensors,
  actuators
• Humans will be in the way
• Hacker and virus paradise
• System propagates false information about
  individuals or organisation
• Complexity of s/w installation on a workstation
  or server how do you cope with billions?
• Cater for huge systems scale down to body area
  networks

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Information Management

• Billions of sensors generating petabytes of
  (dynamic) data
• Need filtering, aggregation, collaborative
  sensing, new query techniques which cater for
  errors in source.
• Meta data description of information
• Provenance ? audit trails, how and where modified
  etc.

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Power Management

• Require ultra-low power devices, transmitters
  etc. for body implants, sensor networks
• Light-weight communication protocols
• Energy scavenging extract power from light,
  heat, vibration or motion
• Heart motion, solar cells, fuel cells, heat
  converters, heart motion ..

SRI Shoe Power 0.5W
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Pervasive Systems Architecture
Remote Application Servers
Sensors
Local Network Intermediate Servers
Clients
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Self Managed Cell
Managed resources
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Cell Management Interaction
Application
Services
Networks

• Horizontal peer-to-peer
• Vertical representing hierarchical service
  provision
• Composition internal SMCs are not visible
  externally

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Autonomic Management

• Autonomic self-organising, self-configuring,
  self-healing, self-optimising, adaptive
  management
• Remove human from the loop
• Intelligent agents, mobile agents, policy,
  genetic algorithms?

Policy
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Security and Trust

• Interactions cross multiple organisational
  boundaries
• Lessons from history everything worth hacking
  gets hacked
• Need for secure out of the box set up
• Context aware adaptive security
• Identify friend or foe ? level of trust
• Small communicators, with confidential data, are
  easily lost or stolen biometric authentication?
• Trust based on experience recommendations
• Credential validation with intermittent network
  connectivity

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Privacy

• You are now predictable
• System can co-relate location, context and
  behaviour patterns
• Do you want employer, colleagues or insurance
  company to know you carry a medical monitor?
• Tension between authentication and anonymity
  business want to authenticate you for financial
  transactions and to provide personalized
  service
• Users should be aware of being monitored
• User control of information generated or access
  to stored information

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Policy
Rule governing choices in behaviour of the system

• Derived from trust relationships, enterprise
  goals and Service level agreements
• Need to specify and modify policies without
  coding into automated agents
• Policies are persistent
• But can be dynamically modified
• ?Change system behaviour without modifying
  implementation not new functionality

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Policy Based Adaptive Systems

• Authorisation policiesDerived from trust
  relationships to define what resources or
  services clients can access, what agents or code
  can be loaded into servers, or what code loaded
  into the client can do.
• Obligation PoliciesEvent-condition-action rules
  to trigger when to perform actions, what alarms
  to generate etc
• Ponder declarative object-oriented languagefor
  specifying policies.See http//www-dse.doc.ic.ac.
  uk/Research/policies/

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Example Authorisation Policy
inst auth facilities subject guests target
gym pool action enter when time.between
(0900, 2100)
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Example Obligation Policy

• Enable low security profile on entry to work area
  and enable high security profile on exit from
  work area
• inst oblig
• on workentry (userid)
• subject securityAgent (userid)
• do enable.pda (userid, lowSecurity)
• inst oblig
• on workexit (userid)
• subject securityAgent (userid)
• do enable.pda (userid, highSecurity)

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Roles

• Group of policies with a common subject
• Defines rights (authorisations) and duties
  (obligation)
• Position in organisation nurse, surgeon
• Mobile visitor roles in hotel or shopping mall
  policies which apply to mobile user in an
  environment or a community
• Paramedic attending an accident

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The Business Model

• Who pays for the pervasive support infrastructure
  of processing, storage, wireless services
  everywhereon the street, in planes, trains,
  shops, home?
• Accounting and billing

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Theory

• Large Scale, complex, dynamically self-modifying
  system
• Currently use ad-hoc implementation, relying on
  skill of programmers.
• Need coherent and rigorous theory to provide
  concepts, calculi and automated tools for
  specification and analysis

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Conclusion

• Currently pervasive systems are more hype than
  reality
• Some component technologies are available
• Technology problems - seamless communications,
  power
• Management problems - adaptive self management,
  privacy
• No theory to underpin understanding, analysis
  design

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Further Information

• UK-UbiNet
• Conferences
• Research Projects
• Links
• http//www-dse.doc.ic.ac.uk/Projects/UbiNet/links.
  html