Sven van der Meer, Brendan Jennings, Keara Barrett, Ray Carroll

Design Principles for Smart Space Management

Telecommunications Software and Systems Group (TSSG)
Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT)

Today, previously separated networks converge. Tomorrow, this process is going to challenge the established design principles of service frameworks. The new challenges for management frameworks are approaches that address composition, scalability, reliability and robustness as well as autonomous self-adaptation of services and resources. Research in these areas should result in software systems for management, control and use of fully distributed system.

This paper aims to start the discussion for a roadmap for the development of design principles that allow effective and efficient management of smart spaces. The starting point is the M-Zones model, which describes the relationships between smart spaces, smart services, managed zones and actors within this environment. The vision in short is to develop a management framework that allows for autonomous, self-adapting and self-managed services. Services are autonomous by means of interactions with the user, with resources and with other services. Services are self-adapting realizing the necessary modifications to interact with evolving, heterogeneous environments. And services are self-managed by means of configuration, scalabilit, fault management and security.