INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES (ICT)
PROGRAMME

FUTURE AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES (FET)
FET Proactive Intiative: PERVASIVE ADAPTATION (PERADA)

Foundations of Adaptive Networked Societies

of Tiny Artefacts

The FRONTS project is a joint effort of eleven academic and research institutes in foundational algorithmic research in Europe. The aim of the project is to provide a unifying scientific framework and a coherent set of design rules, for global systems resulting from the integration of autonomous interacting entities, dynamic multi-agent environments and ad-hoc mobile networks.

The project takes place between February 2008 to January 2011. It is funded by the European Commission under the Information Communication Technologies programme part of the Seventh Framework, as project number 215270.

The project details in terms of Action Line, Organization and Description of Work at a high level are maintained by CORDIS, under the ICT section.

Second Year Results

Our life is now full of small devices that communicate with each other when they are close. Actually such devices form networks that can potentially support myriads of new and exciting applications. Technology would like such systems to be dependable and adaptive; to the user needs, sudden changes of the environment, specific applications characteristics. FRONTS focuses on the algorithmic foundations of such adaptive networks (e.g., consisting of sensors or other small devices).

After two years of work we have made decisive steps towards the target of FRONTS. During the second year, we have advanced our two dominant formal models for adaptive networks of locally interacting devices. Our models capture asynchronous dynamic local interactions, the use of local memories of devices, as well as, continuous interactions with the environment. We have also produced two sets of complete schemes: one set of schemes for the internal continuous self-organization of the network, and another set of schemes for adapting and responding to external changes dynamically.

During the second year we designed and implemented seven large “unifying” experiments (and nine smaller scope experiments) in which we have tested our schemes and measured performance. Our project has already produced a sizable amount of very innovative software (all available from our repository). Some of this software gained golden awards internationally, int he application area of pervasive dynamic gaming for recreation. Also we want to stress the fact that some of our experiments here run on real heterogeneous hardware devices.

Our approaches are algorithmic in nature and are inspired from diverse fields such as Economics and Markets, Biological Systems and even Thermodynamics and Physics. Some special points in our progress are:

• Our formal models are verifiable and programmable.
• Our schemes for the internal continuous network reorganization include virtual coordinates of devices, smart tags and recommendation methods.
• Our schemes for reacting to the environment include energy-awareness and assignment of roles to devices.
• Adaptive security and trust of pervasive networks of tiny devices is becoming a strong contribution of our project: We now have implemented defenses to Sybil attacks and have designed a novel use of RFID tags (what we call “security helpers”). Our systems can cooperatively protect themselves from subsystem takeovers.

The FET Proactive Initiative on Pervasive Adaptation targets technologies and design paradigms for massive-scale pervasive information and communication systems, capable of autonomously adapting to highly dynamic and open technological and user contexts. Adaptation strategies (bio-inspired, stochastic or others) will operate at different time scales and speeds, from short term adaptation to long-term evolution, and will imply changes in software, hardware, protocols and/or architecture at different levels of granularity and abstraction.

The proactive initiative is coordinated by PERADA that aims to bring together the wide range of researchers in the field, and to build a new community of researchers who can work together on common goals, so ensuring that the research carried out by community members is integrated, coordinated, and disseminated.