Environmental information concerns facts and objects in the surrounding neighborhood of an AmI node such as buildings, cars, people, barriers, temperature, etc. The detection and interpretation of such environmental information requires appropriate sensor interfaces. Sensors may be grouped to form intelligent sensor networks.
AmI systems communicate spontaneously
AmI systems are under continuous pressure to keep their internal information cache up-to-date and comprehensive in order to fulfill their mission. This requires using every opportunity to get in touch with other AmI nodes joining the same ad-hoc network and exchange useful information with them.
AmI systems have unconventional interfaces
Being embedded systems, AmI systems interact with humans via the application they control. The application dictates the necessary way of interaction between the AmI system and the human and requires unconventional interfaces which are customized for the given application scenarios. For example, let us consider a smart blind stick. A smart blind stick communicates with AmI systems in its neighborhood in order to detect the next safe road crossing. As soon as this information is available, the smart blind stick sends a message to a voice generation component which sends the voice output to the earphones of the handicapped person. It is obvious that it would not make any sense in this application scenario to send this information as text to a screen. In general, AmI systems communicate with humans in the most natural way. This dictates voice and gestured input/output as the preferred media.
AmI systems have to be highly adaptive
Because of missing stable connectivity to services and information sources in ad-hoc networks, AmI systems can never base their operation on the availability of complete and up-to-date information and services. This has the consequence that AmI systems have to organize their services in an adaptive way, i.e. the degree of service varies with the amount of information available and the reach-ability of external services.
AmI systems are of highly heterogeneous nature
In AmI distributed systems, communication requirements can range from few bit/s to several Gbit/s, computational requirements from some kop/s to several Top/s and the power requirements from microwatt to watts. To face this problem AmI architectures are layered architectures i.e. they are based on different types of nodes with various communication bandwidth, signal processing capabilities, and power constraints, respectively. Moreover, AmI nodes from different vendors will frequently join the same ad-hoc network. These nodes are usually based on different processors, operating systems and application software approaches, i.e. we are faced with a highly heterogeneous nature of distributed AmI systems. This poses a challenging burden on the development of international standards for protocols and interchange data formats in order to retain node interoperability.
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