A Bio-chemical Approach to Awareness in Pervasive Systems

Abstract

The emerging proliferation of devices with sensing and networking technologies offers opportunities for delivering pervasive services through interactions between spatially local resources. Here, applications are challenged to become aware of their surroundings: to discover, filter and reason on information relevant to their goals. Without centralised services to control information flow, decentralised mechanisms must partition these responsibilities across the environment. This paper explores a bio-chemically inspired approach to realising awareness in an open, dynamic setting, building towards complex self-organising awareness algorithms for data collection, reasoning, and querying. Through simulation we provide a preliminary evaluation of the proposed approach.

Developing pervasive multi-agent systems with nature-inspired coordination

“…It is also possible to provide forms of distributed reasoning and overall to increase the ability of distributed agents to become aware of the situations of which they are part [89,90]. An example of particular relevance consists in exploiting the chemotaxis pattern [10] mentioned earlier.…”

A coordination model of pervasive service ecosystems

“…Other algorithmic processes, most notably application-specific reasoning, sit outside the scope of the eco-law model, and must be implemented in a traditional manner by application agents, similar to those described in the previous section: the inputs to such processes are achieved by observing proper LSAs, and the process outputs may be disseminated through application manipulation of existing LSAs or creation and diffusion of new LSAs. Recent works illustrate how different algorithms for information aggregation can be implemented in this way on top of the gradient framework [50], or how complex self-organising situation awareness algorithms for data collection, reasoning, and querying can be realised [51].…”

Spatial awareness in pervasive ecosystems

“…The path towards realising this vision is Spatial awareness in pervasive ecosystems paved with substantial technical challenges to support services in becoming aware of their surroundings: to seek, discover, and filter information relevant to their goals, and to aggregate, interpret, and reason over such information to identify situations-semantically meaningful classifications of states of importance upon which they will adapt their behaviour. To capture forms of awareness with varying complexity, we present a catalogue of spatial awareness attainable as a spectrum, illustrated in Figure 1, with basic data representation at one end and high-level awareness achieved through the collaborations of ecosystem participants at the other (Stevenson et al, 2013b). From left to right we mark six points along this continuum and briefly overview the awareness capabilities available at each.…”