Towards a Context-aware Embedded Internet

A vast quantitative growth of the Internet over the past years has fertilized “desktop” information society technologies, the most prominent instance of which is the personal computer. The growing availability of wireless communication technologies in the wide, local and personal area, together with the pervasive use of mobile and embedded computing devices gives strong raise, however, for Internet services adapted to context, particularly to the person, time and location of their use. The seamless provision of services to anyone (personalized services) at any place (location based services) and at any time will presumably fertilize a much bigger qualitative growth of the Internet. It is expected that an “embedded Internet” will evolve, enabled by wirelessly networked autonomous special purpose computing devices (i.e. Internet appliances), providing largely invisible support for tasks performed by users. Traditional I/O oriented computing will be replaced by a computing landscape sensing the physical world via a huge variety of electrical, magnetic, optical, acoustic, chemical etc. sensors, and controlling it via a manifold of actuators in such a way that it becomes merged with the virtual world. Applications and Internet services will have to be greatly based on the notion of context and knowledge, will have to cope with highly dynamic environments and changing resources, and will need to evolve towards a more implicit and proactive interaction with users. In this paper we explore some issues, challenges and enabling technologies associated with this vision of such a “pervasive” Internet.