Vision and Challenges for Realising the Internet of Things

T
oday’s Internet is rapidly evolving
towards a highly distributed
and communication-intensive
collection of services. In the future,
these services would be expected to
detect automatically data and to selfconfigure,
in order to meet the needs
of various Users, in diverse situations,
without requiring explicit human intervention.
To achieve this, a re-thinking is needed of the
current way of developing and deploying
distributed systems and applications. One
approach consists in developing an “open
ecosystem", which can prosper and thrive.
This vision is attractive: it provides new and
better services to Users.
CASCADAS goal is to provide an automatic
component-based framework that can support
the deployment of a novel set of services,
via distributed applications, which can cope
with dynamic and uncertain environments,
i.e. having Self-Configuration, Self-Healing;
Self-Optimization; Self-Protection (self-
CHOP) capabilities.
Technical and innovation
approach
CASCADAS is a robust modular framework
and acts as a high-level reference model for a
new generation of programmable elements,
which can be reused at different stack levels.
Such a model, is the core of the fundamental
software Autonomic Communication Elements
(ACE).
Target users and benefits
CASCADAS proposes a do-it-yourself innovative
services and knowledge management,
which will allow real People to be the target
Users. CASCADAS has identified the following
main areas of benefits and industrial exploitation
of results:
Introduction of innovative SAC “services”
(and new business models)
Future Internet development;
Optimization of Telco-ICT Service Frameworks
(Capex savings);
Simplification of Management (Opex savings)
of above Frameworks.
CASCADAS framework, called the Toolkit,
provides a running-time environment capable
of supporting ACEs in all their features.
CASCADAS Toolkit
CASCADAS
Component-ware for
Automatic Aware Situations Communications
for a Dynamic and Adaptable Service
ACE Toolkit is available for download at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/acetoolkit/
Project deliverables are available at:
http://www.cascadas-project.org
Toolkit has been successfully used to build a
prototype system to suit a potentially industrial
future scenario, called Behavioural Pervasive
Advertisement, which takes a crowded
venue, with many public screens. The advertising
screens display information independent
of the context. Smart services could then
gather publicly information on Users and
advertise their particular interests. This
would transform the effectiveness of advertising
service! Hence, the level of business investments
would be higher, in buying and
allocating advertising time slots, by "auctioning"
these advertising time slots. CASCADAS
has an auction paradigm whereby advertisers
can acquire the rights of advertising, on a
specific screen, at a specific time.
Further information:
Partners: Telecom Italia, BT, Budapest University,
Fraunhofer, Imperial College London, Eurecom,
Politecnico di Milano, Uni Kassel, Uni di
Modena e Reggio Emilia, Uni Trento, Uni
Ulster, MIP School of Management, Uni Athens,
Uni Libre de Bruxelles
Contact: Antonio Manzalini; Telecom Italia
Via Reiss Romoli 274;
IT-10148 Torino; Italy
Tel.: +39-011-2285817
E-mail: Antonio.manzalini@telecomitalia.it
Internet: www.cascadas-project.org
Duration: 01.01.06 – 31.12.08 - 36 Months 197
CERP-IoT – Cluster of European Research Projects on the Internet of Things