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9.1 Introduction 319
• Shrinkage of hardware and software. Some already established
devices which, in one way or another, are constrained to low power
consuming or narrow bandwidth necessities, as motes in ubiquitous
networking, are sure to be smaller than domestic computers, so
services need to be provided at their minimum possible capabilities
of transmission, energy storage, etc. This dramatic shrinking in
hardware (and consequently, in software) will take its toll when
creating new services and experiences, but without it ubiquitous
computing would lose a part of its meaning.
• Human intervention is reduced to its minimal expression. As
new paradigms in computing (Internet of Things, Service Oriented
Computing) are developed under the ideas of Mark D. Weiser,
it becomes crystal clear that if an everyday augmented element
is to become part of a service provided by networked embedded
systems like Wireless Sensor Networks, that supposedly is as quiet
and discrete as it can be, intrusion and attention from a human being
must be kept at their lowest rates (unless the end user is willing
to be told about any datum related to the service) in order to have
the devices participating in the Internet of Things turning into —
or remain as — a silent, non-attention demanding electronic piece
naturally integrated within its environment — or embedded in an
object that is already like that —, which will not add extra duties
or discomfort to its human beneficiaries.
• Content and parameters under constant change. Should OSI or
TCP/IP architectures be considered as the components architecture
of a service found in an Internet of Things scenario, with a physical
layer at the bottom and an application layer at the top, any device
is likely to find a huge number of its kind scattered through those
layers: personal computers’, wireless nodes’ or smart phones’ electronics
as hardware and almost any imaginable idea as applications.
Not only must an efficient middleware layer abstract the general
working conditions and offer a usable interface to higher levels,
but also has to deal with the changing status of applications: if a
device is working in combination with, for example, a piece of
clothes, services will change as the user walks or drives. In this
way, some services will be lost, rendering the application built to