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Design drivers have been at the core of GSRC from its early incarnation.
Ultra low-power and small PicoRadios, video decoders and high performance
gateways and routers have been used to drive the intellectual agenda of
the center, and to measure and metricize the quality of the research
results. With the diversity of the activities in the center, a tendency
exists to adopt a wide range of drivers each addressing one particular
metric or technology. While effective, this approach has the disadvantage
that it misses the opportunity of cross-technology fertilization and
integration. As was already suggested in the center review last year, a
single center-wide (and even inter-center) driver would be more effective
from the latter perspective. The challenge lays in finding a driver that
spans the complete timeline of the activities of the center (from 5 to 20
years out) and the wide range of technologies (from ultra-small low power
peripherals to high speed power-constrained compute and communication
servers). While one can envision many equally plausible driver scenarios,
we believe the ambient home of the future presents a unique opportunity
that addresses most of the expressed concerns (other applications could
include areas such as advanced healthcare, infrastructure monitoring,
ubiquitous mobile computing, etc), and act as an umbrella for most of the
center research activities.
Falling electronics prices have brought sophisticated consumer
electronics within the reach of average users. Further, due to the
proliferation of different device types, communication, and media coding
standards, interoperability between devices will become increasingly
important. Advances in the electronics industry have also driven growth
in several related areas, in addition to voice and data networking, home
entertainment, including surveillance, home automation products,
appliances and ad-hoc wireless sensor networks (AWSN), which promise to
add a truly ambient intelligent component to the home. The future home
clearly represents an opportunity for the convergence of these different
technologies far beyond the level of integration seen today. In fact, the
future smart-home will contain a collection of heterogeneous networked
devices, capable of distributed computation, dynamic reconfiguration,
high-performance media dissemination, and user/environment awareness.
There are several problems which need to be addressed for this
convergence to be successful. In the past, electronic equipment was sold
as vertically integrated boxes. Today, new solutions and standards are
introduced faster than the lifetime of many pieces of infrastructure. As
a result, consumers incrementally upgrade their existing systems. In
addition, new products are introduced, and must be added to the existing
system. Thus, it is desirable to design a system that can seamlessly
integrate new devices without user intervention. To do so, the
information processing infrastructure of the home must possess the
following properties:
- Zero-Configuration: minimal need for device configuration.
- Universality: ability to connect any device to any other device (guaranteed).
- Multi-User Optimality: optimized user experience, in the presence of multiple users and many simultaneous tasks.
- Adaptability: the platform has the ability to change according to users' desires, their presence, and the integration of new devices
To support this functionality in an ad-hoc fashion is hard if not
impossible. A more scalable and plausible alternative is to build the
home system around an infrastructural core, called the "Universal Content
Router(s) (UCR)". The UCR approach provides a common backplane with the
following properties: (1) Supports any interface or format, at any level
of the protocol stack; (2) future proofs the system with an extensible
core, while maintaining backward compatibility; and (3) optimizes the
quality of service (QoS) for simultaneous tasks via a flexible resource
management strategy.
The UCR in its full incarnation pushes the limits in all the metrics we
have enumerated earlier, such as huge computational power at high energy
efficiency, flexibility and extensibility, resiliency (the home
infrastructure should run with ultimate reliability for a time span of 5
to 10 years ...) and opportunity for completely new paradigms in terms
of computation and user interaction. Flexible cognitive wireless
interfaces, advanced signal processing algorithms to enhance the user
experience in a dynamic fashion, ultra low power sensors, automatic
discovery of presence of capabilities and contents are just some of the
challenges. While the UCR and the ambient home touch most of the research
agenda of the GSRC, it also offers inter-center opportunities. As
explained further, we plan on collaboration with C2S2 in the area of
cognitive and programmable wireless links, and with FENA in the area of
alternative strategies in building ultra low power communication links
using arrays of non-conventional devices such as carbon nanotubes. Other
opportunities exist for collaboration with the IFC as well.
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