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 managingtheir 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-managment at varying levels (for individual devices, for simple body-areaor home-area networks, as well as large scale network infrastructures) we advocate the concept of a self managed cell (SMC) as the basic architecture pattern at both local and intergrated 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 SMC’s can be dynamically structured into large structures and specialise SMC’s and their interactions for two e-health application scenarios.
This project was in Collaboration with Prof. Joe Sventek at the University of Glasgow