Our research on the Service Plane

The autonomic capabilities are realized in form of high level control services that run on nodes with sufficient resources inside the network. A service might for instance control the climate of a room or the energy consumption inside a house. A service might also take care that the music follows us through the house or even adapts to us and our mood outside, when we enter an autonomicity ready environment like a pub where the music might adopt to the guests.

The limit of possible services is the sky if our input variables really are all devices inside our environment and we can control every device. And this is what we are realizing with the platform.

Services are logically situated on top of the big abstraction layer "knowledge plane". It allows them to be running on appropriate nodes providing enough resources. This leads to new possibilities especially for domains with low resources as they can outsource control and management tasks.

Domains with enough resources also profit from our approach as it allows the migration of services as well as load balancing and other mechanisms that lead to more efficient usage of the resources. The resilience as an important factor not only for security critical services inside a home is also strongly improved.

Services communicate with the knowledge plane over the so-called knowledge agent. It provides a unified interface to the knowledge objects that represent the controllable playground for the services as they define their input and manipulation possibilities. The limitation of a unified interface gives the freedom of reusing already existing funcionality from other services inside the network. Plug and play of services becomes reality.

Fig. 2: Service plug and play.

The availability of a unified information- and data model makes it easy to develop generic services that are able to control heaters of different manufacturers for instance as they all use the same model as base.

We envision enthusiastic home users to provide models of their hardware to our global model store so that other users can automatically profit if they possess such hardware. Providing a model will be as easy as sharing CD title information over CDDB today. Integrating a device someone already uploaded a model for will just be plug and run. An interesting challenge here is the convergence of different models.

We also envision an application store for home control and management services that can be provisioned by one click inside a home. Interesting challenges here are security ratings for instance.

Knowledge-Plane Mechanisms for Home-automation by the example of location-based services

Intelligent Distributed Metering

Localisation Service