Title: AMI INFRASTRUCTURE

AmI Infrastructure

The concept of AmI provides a wide-ranging vision of how the Information Society will develop. Certainly, the emphasis of AmI is on greater user- friendliness, more efficient services support, user- empowerment, and support for human interactions. To fulfil this scenario, the following major technological research clusters have been proposed, which are deemed a necessary requirement for the AmI vision:

1. AmI compatible enabling hardware: including fully optical networks, nano-micro electronics, power and display technologies

2. AmI open platforms: for interoperating networks based upon a corporate effort to define a ‘service control platform’

3. Intuitive technologies: involving efforts to create natural human interfaces

4. AmI developments in support of personal and community development: including socio-technical design factors, support for human to human interaction and the analysis of societal and political development

5. Meta-Content services developments: to improve information handling, knowledge management and community memory, involving techniques such as smart tagging systems, semantic web technologies, and search technologies

6. Security and trust technologies: in support of privacy, safety, and dependability.

The AmI infrastructure is built on the notion that ad-hoc, complex, heterogeneous networks can function and communicate in a seamless and interoperable way. Only in this way can the broad range of services envisaged be offered to the individual. Essentially, the AmI is expected to embrace the heterogeneity arising from the different network technologies such that it appears homogeneous to the user. The vision is to allow for co-operation between networks on demand and without the need for offline negotiation between network operators.

The importance of this was underlined by the ISTAG, who identified three key breakpoints for AmI development. Notably, the first of these is: 

“… under the requirement that AmI calls for a very flexible and seamless interoperation of many different devices on many different networks, it is a key requirement that there is a set of common platforms or de facto standards to permit this interoperation to take place.”

The group felt that this would either be achieved through a deliberate effort to develop such open platforms or would arise from proprietary pacts between industrial suppliers. 

The scale of this issue is highlighted by examining the levels of interaction that may occur between the user and the technology within this AmI context. The ‘MultiSphere Reference Model’ is shown in .

Figure : The MultiSphere Reference Model showing various layers of interaction desirable in the AmI scenario

Although this model is aimed primarily at putting issues and ideas of wireless communication in context, from it, and similar models, the following interaction levels have been identified:

1. Body area network (BAN) connecting sensors, chips or devices attached to the body/clothes or implanted in the body (distance: <1 meter) 

1. Personal area network (PAN) consisting of personal and/or shared devices or peripherals (distance: <10 meters) 

1. Local area network (LAN) for the nomadic access to fixed and mobile networks, and to the Internet  (distance: <100 meters)

2. Wide area network (WAN) for the access and routing with full mobility (worldwide access) 

3. The “Cyberworld” where users and intelligent agents interact (virtual) 

To fulfill the current vision of AmI, it is necessary that fluid communication between these layers is realised through the use of interoperable hardware and software standards and protocols. Only in this way will adequate profiling activity be realised, utilising the mass of data which such systems make accessible.