News
2010 Master and PhD Thesis Award Results
The winners of the 2010 CONET Master and PhD Thesis Competition have been awarded during the EWSN 2010 conference.
Newsletter issue #7
2010's first newsletter contains a guest column on "Sensing China and SIMIT", the member profile of UCL and an article on "Coffee: A Small and Efficient File System for Sensor Networks".
Call for Papers: CONET 2010
Co-located with CPS Week 2010, CONET organizes the First International Workshop on Networks of Cooperating Objects. Submission deadline is March 1st, 2010.
Concept and Project Vision
There is a number of different system concepts that have gained a lot of relevance in the area of embedded systems over the past couple of years. First, there is the classic concept of embedded systems where the focus is on control systems for physical processes (machinery, automobiles, UAVs, planes, etc.). Secondly, the notion of pervasive computing (also called ubiquitous computing) has evolved, where the vision, first stated by Mark Weiser in his seminal paper from 1991, foresees everyday objects having some form of computation capacity and, in most cases, sensing and communication facilities. Thirdly, the notion of wireless sensor networks has arisen, where small computing devices (sensor nodes) are able to sense their environment and cooperate in order to achieve a well-defined goal.
We claim that these three types of quite diverse systems share a lot of commonalities on the one hand and, on the other hand, have some complementary aspects in common that make a combination of these systems into a coherent system vision promising. In particular, the important notions of control, heterogeneity, wireless communication, dynamic and ad-hoc nature and cost are prevalent to various degrees in each of these systems.
A future system concept needs to combine the strong points of all three system concepts in at least these functional aspects. It has to provide support for the control of physical processes like today’s embedded systems do, have as good support for device heterogeneity and spontaneity of usage as required by pervasive and ubiquitous computing approaches, and has to be as cost efficient and wirelessly agile as wireless sensor networks are. These new systems consist, therefore, of individual entities or objects that jointly strive to reach a common goal, which will typically be a goal in sensing or control, and are dynamically and loosely federating themselves for cooperation, taking care not to overtax their available resources.
Definition: Cooperating Object
The term "Cooperating Objects" was coined explicitly for the purpose of describing such systems by the 12 members of the Embedded WiSeNts Consortium, a Coordination Action funded by the EC between September 1st, 2004 and December 31st, 2006 as part of the 6th Framework Programme. One of the main results of this Coordination Action was the publishing of the Embedded WiSeNts Research Roadmap [1] that defines the concept of Cooperating Objects in the following way:
“In the abstract sense, a Cooperating Object is a single entity or a collection of entities consisting of:
- sensors,
- controllers (information processors),
- actuators or
- cooperating objects
that communicate with each other and are able to achieve, more or less autonomously, a common goal.
More precisely, sensors are devices that act as inputs to the Cooperating Object and are able to gather and retrieve information either from other Cooperating Objects or from the environment.
Controllers are devices that act as data or information processors and, obviously, must interact with sensors and actuators in order to be able to interact with their environment. Furthermore, controllers are equipped with some kind of storage device that allows them to perform their tasks. The amount of “effort” devoted by a particular controller to either information processing or storage tasks is determined on an individual basis. This way, the sensor network might be composed of controllers that mostly provide information processing capabilities, whereas others might be specialized in the storage of data.
Finally, actuators are devices that act as output producers and are able to interact and modify their environment.
It seems clear that if sensors, controllers and actuators need to interact with each other in a distributed environment, all of them need to be equipped with communication capabilities. These might of course be based on wired or wireless technology. The inclusion of other cooperating objects as part of a cooperating object itself indicates that these objects can combine their sensors, controllers and actuators in a hierarchical way and are, therefore, able to create arbitrarily complex structures.”
From this definition, it is apparent that this new vision is more powerful and has a larger scope than each of the individual system concepts out of which it evolved.
The vision of Cooperating Objects is, therefore, quite new and needs to be understood in more detail and probably extended with inputs from the relevant individual communities that compose it. This will enable us to better understand the impact on the research landscape and to steer the available resources in a meaningful way.
[1] Pedro José Marrón and Daniel Minder. Embedded WiSeNts Research Roadmap. Logos Verlag, Berlin, 2006, ISBN 3-8325-1424-4. Available from Logos Verlag, Berlin and from the Embedded WiSeNts Website: http://www.embedded-wisents.org