Opportunistic systems

One of the basic foundations of ubiquitous computing is self awareness. If we consider the huge amount and the fast growing number of embedded or mobile devices the traditional design-time-defined sensing approaches are incompatible. Ubiquitous computing system designs have to shift their approach from time defined sensing to the one that opportunistically collects the data from various sources like physical sensors, internet etc. prominent examples being positioning systems implemented in the current generations of smart phones opportunistically making the use of GPS, GSM.

Opportunistic sensing is the foundation for self aware ubiquitous computer systems including very large numbers of entities in open ended environments. Opportunistic sensing system is not limited to specific application domain.

Until today the sensing networks consisted of homogeneous cluster of small sensing nodes communicating wirelessly. They executed a fixed set of applications. The data is streamed over and there exist a simultaneous end to end path from source to destination. In the mobile networks there is no fix infrastructure. Nodes move around and change environment constantly. The mobile phones carry the data from cluster to cluster and there is no simultaneous end to end communication path. Sensor data is collected and distributed opportunistically. 

Many times the case is that mobile phones use human centric approach not the device centric approach. Mobile phone user not only becomes collector of data but he also filters and disseminates the data.

Context awareness is one of the foundations of ubiquitous computing. It can be achieved through various techniques like signal processing, pattern recognition & reasoning. Opportunistic sensing revisits these techniques to deal with opportunistic nature of the substrate.
 

There can be many new areas for the opportunistic sensing

• Mobile crowd sensing
• Urban sensing
• Smart appliances
• Traffic & transportation

1. Mobile crowd sensing – The widespread use of mobile phones calls for the decentralized use of sensor data to infer the crowd behavior. Information spread and processing are some of the main domains for the technology.
2. Urban sensing – mobile, vehicle mounted sensors combined with publicly available information enable user to sense, share, record their personal environment.
3. Smart appliances – devices which are able to adapt the changing service requirements are one of the service domains of opportunistic sensing.
4. Traffic & transportation – Collective vehicular settings, acting and requesting services while transit is also one of the domains of opportunistic sensing.