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.

First 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 a year of work, we have made some concrete steps towards the target of  FRONTS. We have now two candidate formal models for programming such networks and for anticipating their behaviour. The first model considers populations of tiny artefacts that interact in pairs and nicely captures notions of fairness and scalability. The second model is based on ideas of communicating finite automata, that can sense the environment. We will extend these models to also capture fault tolerance, trust and other issues. Our ultimate goal is to be able to design such systems and verify the correctness and level of dependability of such systems using these formal models.

The architecture of the network infrastructure of such systems is composed of two almost orthogonal dimensions: the functionalities that are responsible for the internal continual self-organization of the network and the components that adapt to environmental changes in a dynamic way.

In terms of the internal continual adaptation, we identified the critical functionalities that such networks should always maintain, in order to be ready to adapt to external challenges. Properties such as Connectivity, Security, Self-Organisation, Role Assignment are among this list. We judge that this ''eternal preparation'' for adaptation is crucial; by eternal preparation we refer to the work that the adaptive network performs in order to be ready to adapt (in timely manner) when an external cause is detected. Our methods focus on reducing the overhead caused by this ''alert'' network state.

Concerning the ability to adapt to external challenges, we have now concrete approaches. They draw from diverse fields such as Economics and Markets, Biological systems etc. and they are algorithmic in nature. Failures and adverse situations have been considered as well as mobility and intermittent connectivity. A nice special point is our progress on lightweight crypto-based techniques for adaptive security of such networks.

Concluding, we have set up and experimental platform based on the iSense hardware modules, a software repository and a simulation environment based on the Shawn simulator capable of handling large networks of tiny artefacts. All our methods will be tested in the 2nd year and the feedback of the tests will be incorporated into the design and implementation. 

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.