News archive

NEWS

22. - 26.6.2009
Project poster and demo at IEEE SECON 2009 , Rome, Italy

2. - 4.9.2009
Project presentation at 20th Tyrrhenian International Workshop on Digital Communications, Pula, Sardinia, Italy

9.9.2009
Project presentation at EU-Brazil Networked Embedded Intelligence Workshop, São Paulo, Brazil

15.9.2009
Research paper presentation at ruSMART 2009 co-located with NEW2AN 2009, St. Petersburg, Russia
 
"Towards a Lightweight Security Solution for User-Friendly Management of Distributed Sensor Networks"

22. - 24.9.2009
Steering group/plenary meeting at Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland

5. - 9.10.2009
Third Monitoring and Control Concertation Week
Brussels, Belgium

16.10.2009
Project presentation at CPS Workshop at the Embedded Systems Week 2009, Grenoble, France, co-organized by Nikil Dutt, University of California, Irvine and Jorge Pereira, EC

17.2.2010
Project presentation at Workshop at the EWSN 2010, Coimbra, Portugal

22.2.2010
POBICOS - HYDRA - SOFIA Workshop, Brussels, Belgium

23. - 24.2.2010
POBICOS stand at the ICT4EE project exhibition, Brussels, Belgium

23. - 24.2.2010
Steering group/plenary meeting, Brussels, Belgium

13.4.2010
POBICOS poster and demo at CPS Week 2010, Stockholm, Sweden

21.4.2010
POBICOS middleware source code released as open source under GPL license

2. - 4.6.2010
Forth Monitoring and Control Concertation Meeting
Brussels, Belgium

1. - 2.7.2010
Second year Review
Accenture Technology Labs, Sophia Antipolis, France

POBICOS is a small and medium-scale focused research project (STREP) in the ICT area co-funded by the European Commission under EU Framework Programme 7 (FP7). It is running for three years from May 2008 to April 2010.

Problem statement and goal of the project

The recent advances in lowpower electronics, miniaturisation and wireless communications have created the opportunity to embed sensing, actuating and computing functionality into everyday objects. Although this has already happened to some degree, the full potential of the current lowlevel technology remains unexploited due to the inability to programme such object collections in a straightforward way.

Developing applications for such a community of digitally enhanced objects and appliances is hard for at least two reasons. Firstly, these objects can be very heterogeneous in terms of sensing, actuating and computing resources. Secondly, the actual mix of objects that are available at runtime in a given setting is typically unknown at development time. As a consequence, the programmer does not know and cannot assume exactly which objects (hence which resources) will be available in the environment where the application will be eventually deployed. This combination of (a) the heterogeneity of the object community and (b) the lack of knowledge about object availability at runtime poses a great challenge in terms of application development.

To build ubiquitously deployable applications, the programmer must write applications which are able to automatically exploit whatever "opportunities", i.e. sensor, actuator and computing resources, happen to be available at any given setting. Moreover, these opportunities should be sought as to meet both functional and nonfunctional requirements of the application in the best possible way, scaling gracefully as a function of which and how many of the required resources are available. For example, it could be possible to accomplish a given task not just with a prespecified sensor or actuator, but with any one or more instances belonging to the same of a compatible resource class. Similarly, to minimise energy consumption of batterypowered nodes, processingintensive tasks could be transferred to nodes with ample energy supply and appropriate computing resources.

We refer to the abovedescribed functionality as opportunistic behaviour, and its applications in pervasive computing environments as opportunistic pervasive computing. The goal of the POBICOS project is to actively research and offer support for opportunistic pervasive computing applications by building a platform that enables the easy programming of partially unknown, heterogeneous object communities, and which addresses the key phases of the application lifecycle: development, deployment, and runtime.