|
Abstract - Technical Program - ES 99
AirJava: Networking for Smart Spaces
Kevin L. Mills, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Abstract
Increasingly people work and live on the move. To support this mobile
lifestyle, especially as work becomes more intensely
information-based, companies are producing various portable and
embedded information devices. Concurrently, some interesting
pico-cellular wireless technologies promise to outfit these portable
and embedded devices with high bandwidth, localized, wireless
communication capabilities that can also reach the globally wired
Internet. An impressionist painting emerges of small, specialized
devices roaming among islands of wireless connectivity within a global
ocean of wired networks. Each wireless island becomes a "Smart Space",
where available services and embedded devices can be discovered,
accessed, interconnected with portable devices carried onto the
island, and then the combination of imported and native devices can be
exploited to support the information needs of the current island
inhabitants. In this paper, I outline three specific human-information
interaction challenges that the research community must address in
order to reap the benefits of specialized information devices within
Smart Spaces. Before these research challenges can be adequately
addressed, the research community must have some Smart Spaces with
which to experiment. I describe AirJava, which combines
Java Jini with pico-cellular wireless technology to empower small
devices to discover each other, to exchange programs, and to interact.
While a technology like AirJava should emerge in the
next five years, I propose a means of building AirJava
adapters today so researchers can begin experimenting with Smart
Spaces.
- View the full text of this paper in
HTML form and
PDF form.
- If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site.
- To become a USENIX Member, please see our Membership Information.
|
Need help? Use our Contacts page.
Technical Program