2.1 Overview

The M-Zones Research Programme plans to develop novel information and communications management technology to support dynamic, integrated management of participants, information appliances, and smart space infrastructure. The M-Zones Research Programme is a multi-disciplinary, interinstitutional research programme that will engage in fundamental research in Management and Control systems for integrating Multiple Smart Spaces. This research programme advances the existing long established (10 years) research collaboration between the research team leaders at WIT and TCD and also the recently established collaboration between the research groups at WIT and CIT. The result is a major programme of interdisciplinary research collaboration between the three participating institutions in order to achieve the programme goals. The technical background and expertise of the participants is ideally suited to achieving the goals set by the M-Zones research programme.

The programme research themes of Management and Control of Networks and Information Services, Inter Domain Collaborative Management, Smart Space Technology, Wireless Devices and Network Design are already well-established research areas of the M-Zone research team. The individual research groups and their members have been involved in a large number of national and international research programmes funded both by the European Union, national government and industry. As part of previous and ongoing research programmes the participants have worked collaboratively with research teams both nationally and internationally and are highly regarded in their research communities.

The programme also has the support of two leading smart space research centres, namely FhG-FOKUS in Berlin and BT Research Labs in UK, who will act as external collaborators in the M-Zones programme. Each of these institutions has proposed formal collaboration agreements for the M-Zones research programme and have previously collaborated with the M-Zones partner Universities/Institutes. These external collaborators have been chosen for their complementary research expertise and focal interest.



The Research Challenge

Current research has focused on applications within individual Smart Spaces. Such ‘smart’ applications would include novel interaction/communication mechanisms like AT&T’s active badge project, which investigated context aware computing platforms, or technologies to support individual ‘smart’ services e.g. cyber meeting spaces, image recognition, eye tracking etc. [ATT, BT, NIST]. However, these single, isolated smart spaces are of limited benefit. The real challenge is to enable the dynamic integration of smart spaces, which enable mobile people and devices to roam across such spaces whilst maintaining communication and information services. Mobility is a defining factor of the way people are working and living today. Thus supporting seamless roaming of both users and devices, between different administered/owned smart spaces will help enable the true benefit of mobile working. The ability to dynamically integrate private (e.g. within a home or office), semi private (e.g. within public transport vehicle, library) and public (e.g. park, square) smart spaces is a key element in realising effective mobile working and living.

The major problem for the realisation of Integrated Smart Spaces is the lack of an open management infrastructure within and between such smart spaces. DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, USA) has singled out the (network) management problem inherent in managing smart spaces/embedded systems as the most important challenge facing telecommunications service managers for the next decade. The latest prediction for the Internet is that Information Appliance (e.g. palmtop computers, Internet enabled mobile phones) sales will outnumber Computer sales by 2002. In the world today ONLY 2% of all processors are currently network addressable, 98% processors are embedded! It is these embedded processors, which will be the information sources within smart spaces.