Towards self-coordinating ubiquitous computing environments

Abstract

We are surrounded by an enormous amount of microprocessors. Their quantity outnumbers the human population by a factor of more than three. These microprocessors enable most technological artifacts to become intelligent "things that think" and a majority of these intelligent objects will be linked together to an "Internet of things". This omnipresent virtual "organism" will provide ubiquitous computing to an amount which goes far beyond all presently existing systems. To master this emerging virtual organism, completely new paradigms of operation have to evolve. In this paper we present our vision of establishing self-coordination as the dominant paradigm of operation of future ubiquitous computing environments. This vision is looked at from four different points of view. First of all techniques to model self-coordinating distributed systems in an adequate manner is discussed. Then the principle of self-coordination is applied to individual intelligent objects. In a next step such objects have to be arranged in a networked manner. Again the potential of selfcoordination, now applied to communication infrastructures is studied. Finally self-coordination is applied to next generation interfaces between human beings an artificial ones. In this paper we do not attempt to provide a complete discourse of the area. Instead of this we try to illustrate the four aspects mentioned above by proper examples. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2006.