Context-Aware Pervasive Aerial CommunIcaTion and sIgnal procEssing Systems (CAP ACITIES).

Pervasive systems rely on sensing, computation and communication in objects surrounding people in their everyday life: from simple objects to cars to wearable electronics. These pervasive systems will enable a tsunami of novel applications to improve environment monitoring, health supervision or elderly assistance, to name a few. However, this exploding use of ubiquitous sensors gives rise to new challenges: The sensory data deluge, originating from the massive deployment of sensors, clogs wireless communication networks and overloads processors. Luckily, the same sensory data can be reused to enable more efficient operation of communication, sensing and processing resources, by making them context-aware, conscious of the environment they operate in. Enabling and demonstrating the benefits of context-aware pervasive systems is the goal of this project.

Typical electronic systems rely on design-time application-specific optimizations for energy efficiency. However, as the possible applications of pervasive systems are very diverse, characterized by rapidly varying operational contexts, effective optimization can only be ensured by creating run-time context-awareness within the pervasive system. Context-aware pervasive systems are capable to autonomously derive complex operating context, and autonomously adapt their behavior and hardware configuration accordingly to operate efficiently under scarce resource constraints. The realization of context-aware systems requires advancements in embedded context derivation, context-adaptive communication and signal processing, and finally self-management bringing all aspects together. Context-aware pervasive systems should moreover augment knowledge over time, and benefit from knowledge sharing. Largest benefits from context-awareness are expected in heterogeneous complex sensing environments, under tight, yet dynamically varying resource constraints. Complementing other projects currently running at CubiqLab, the focus of this project will be on scalable aerial communication and image processing systems. A context-aware innovation platform will be used to showcase the context-aware communication and image processing, and conceive an innovative, autonomous CubiqLab application for WSN calibration.