UK-UbiNet Workshop

Pervasive systems require minimal user intervention while constantly adapting their configuration and behaviour. For example, a personal area network of sensors and computational devices monitoring the health of a patient needs to be able to reconfigure itself in response to sensor changes (failures/removals or additions), changes in the activities or context of the patient as well as changes in the health of the patient. This tutorial will present the Self-Managed Cell architecture developed at Imperial College in collaboration with the University of Glasgow with particular emphasis on the use of policy-based techniques for implementing adaptation and reconfiguration in autonomous pervasive systems. Policies are rules governing choices in the behaviour of systems and are often encountered as either event-condition-action rules or authorisation rules, although other types of policies such as negotiation, filtering and delegation can be defined. Policies can be used to define management and adaptation behaviours within autonomous cells of devices. In addition, they can govern interactions between and federation of the autonomous cells. During this tutorial we will present aspects of policy specification and implementation, structuring concepts for interactions between cells and integration of policy driven interpreters with discovery, event and domain services. This tutorial will include a hands-on practical session based on the implementation realised at Imperial College.

Attendees must have a laptop with Java JDK 5.0 Update 6  installed (Windows, MAC or Linux platform) 

The Equator Component Toolkit  (ECT) presents an implementation of a distributed, component-oriented architecture which is available under the open-source BSD license from our project website. ECT allow each software proxy to a particular device to be represented as a component, which is an item of re-usable software with well-defined interface, and is distributed with roughly eighty components, which have mostly been constructed by members of the Equator project. Some of these components are intended to act as software proxies for commonly-used ubicomp devices, and others present software-only functionality, such as the ability to connect to an IMAP-enabled email account, that we have found to be useful in putting ubicomp installations together. The ECT architecture allows components which are to be used in a particular installation to be distributed across multiple computers, and the provides functionality to support component discovery, component instantiation, the manipulation of component interfaces, the specification of a complex set of behaviours involving component instances, and the eventual destruction of a component instances when it is no longer required. ECT itself has been used by members of Equator to construct a number of installations, and has proven to be useful in this process.  This will be a hands on practical session

Attendees must have a laptop (Windows XP or 2000). For further reading see ECT Overview Document .