A Middleware for Smart Environments

A smart environment is a context sensitive system based on ubiquitous computing, in which the environment interacts with its inhabitants through embedded dedicated devices. The design and construction of a smart environment requires the collaboration among several areas, such as (1) intelligent man-machine interfaces, (2) pervasive communications, (3) ambient intelligence, (4) scalable systems and (5) mobile computing. It can be very useful if a designer can abstract the required functionalities from these areas to design and build a smart environment. We propose a layer based middleware for mobile devices (mainly focusing on smart phones) for the intelligent interaction between devices. Each layer provides specific functionalities and serves as the ground upon which upper i.e. more abstract layers are built. We identify the following layers: (1) infrastructure and communications, (2) services and agents, (3) middleware services and (4) collective intelligence. We also propose a formalization of interactions for the specification of services in a smart environment, which is based on ambient calculus and also defines the relationships between layers.