Ambient Intelligence - Impact on Embedded System Design

Hugo de Man Professor Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Senior Research Fellow IMEC The steady evolution of hardware, software and communications technology is rapidly transforming the PC- and dot.com world into the world of Ambient Intelligence (AmI). This next wave of information technology is fundam- tally different in that it makes distributed wired and wireless computing and communication disappear to the background and puts users to the foreground. AmI adapts to people instead of the other way around. It will augment our consciousness, monitor our health and security, guide us through traffic etc. In short, its ultimate goal is to improve the quality of our life by a quiet, reliable and secure interaction with our social and material environment. What makes AmI engineering so fascinating is that its design starts from studying person to world interactions that need to be implemented as an int- ligent and autonomous interplay of virtually all necessary networked electronic intelligence on the globe. This is a new and exciting dimension for most elect- cal and software engineers and may attract more creative talent to engineering than pure technology does. Development of the leading technology for AmI will only succeed if the engineering research community is prepared to join forces in order to make Mark Weiser’s dream of 1991 come true. This will not be business as usual by just doubling transistor count or clock speed in a microprocessor or increasing the bandwidth of communication. Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 6 Foreword......Page 8 Omnia Fieri Possent......Page 10 Embedded System Design Issues in Ambient Intelligence......Page 20 Ambient Intelligence: A Computational Platform Perspective 31......Page 40 Ambient Intelligence and the Development of Embedded System Software......Page 60 Preparation of Heterogeneous Networks for Ambient Intelligence 69......Page 78 The Butt of the Iceberg: Hidden Security Problems of Ubiquitous Systems......Page 100 Emerging Challenges in Designing Secure Mobile Appliances......Page 112 The Domestic Robot - A Friendly Cognitive System Takes Care of your Home......Page 140 QoS-based Resource Management for Ambient Intelligence......Page 168 Terminal QoS: Advanced Resource Management for Cost-Effective Multimedia Appliances in Dynamic Contexts 183......Page 192 Scalability and Error Protection - Means for Error-Resilient, Adaptable Image Transmission in Heterogeneous Environments......Page 212 Metaprogramming Techniques for Designing Embedded Components for Ambient Intelligence......Page 238 Application-Domain-Driven System Design for Pervasive Video Processing......Page 260 Collaborative Algorithms for Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks......Page 280 Energy-Efficient Communication for High Density Networks......Page 304 Application Re-mapping for Fault-Tolerance in Ambient Intelligent Systems......Page 324 Contributing Authors......Page 346 The emerging Ambient Intelligence vision has the potential to fundamentally change our world. This volume is a preview into the next era of computing. It investigates the impact of Ambient Intelligence on embedded system design. Combining visionary contributions with papers on recent developments, it brings to light the challenges in system design towards fulfilling the Ambient Intelligence promise. Topics covered range from processor architectures and embedded software to cognitive robotics and sensor networks, and from quality-of-service and energy-efficient design to security and fault tolerance