Ambient-Oriented Programming

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In the general research area of pervasive computing and ambient intelligence, our research tends to focus on so-called mobile networks. Mobile networks fundamentally differ from traditional, stationary networks in the following two ways:

1. Whereas traditional distributed systems are often composed of heavyweight, computationally intensive nodes, mobile networks tend to consist of small, computationally scarce and mobile devices. A device may be mobile simply because it is small (e.g. a cell phone) or because it is embedded in another mobile devices (e.g. a car's on-board computer).
2. In traditional distributed systems, components are interconnected via fast, wired, reliable communication links. In a mobile network, connections are usually wireless, slower and less reliable. Moreover, the biggest consequence of the wireless connections is that the communication range of devices becomes limited.

Given these unavoidable, fundamental properties of mobile network, our research is founded on the observation of a number of so-called hardware phenomena: phenomena which have a profound impact on software, and which cannot be hidden from either developer or end-user because they are innate to the underlying hardware. The hardware phenomena we observer are:

• Natural Concurrency:
• Autonomous Devices:
• Volatile Connections:
• Ambient Resources: