Challenges
- Energy-efficiency. Progress in battery technology and energy
harvesting falls behind the much faster progress in 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 therefore 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 environments typically support a very
small number of ‘assumed to be friendly’ applications but future ambient systems will only
be viable if they support many diverse applications executing on behalf of different users
with potentially competing and conflicting interests. Users, applications 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 background, the issue of sense-making
becomes a fundamental challenge from two different perspectives: how can systems make
sense of user activity to provide ambient intelligence, and how can users make sense
environments that are characterized by dynamic and spontaneous composition of
services.
- Security and privacy. Ambient systems will have to embrace notions that will respect
human freedom and identity. Systems should be designed to empower and support people
in their activities, but in ways that would avoid the control or manipulation of nonauthorized
others. These considerations include a range of aspects from personal privacy
thorough to "system trust". From a research perspective, this places the challenge of trying
to embody such principles into the design of ambient systems at different levels.
- Integrated development. Ubiquitous computing systems and applications are developed
ad hoc as we lack the abstractions, tools, methods and development frameworks required
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 opposed to
applications). Mobile and wearable systems need to consider large variation as the move
between settings, which may range from digitally rich to digitally impoverished.
- 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 design knowledge and to support
evaluation and comparison of systems.
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