ICING Technical Approach
Mobile communications are becoming increasingly important in our society. Citizens are demanding novel and personalised services, implying new and flexible ways of interaction with the Administration and between themselves. In addition, a growing set of different types of mobile equipment and technologies are being incorporated in the market each year, what lead to more complex network and service infrastructures.
Service provisioning will be based on several network and communication technologies, what will allow us to deliver rich multimedia city services across all fixed and mobile network types. Within the scope of ICiNG, we propose an architecture in which the required network services that enable deployment of advanced end-user applications could be implemented in any point of the network. In that sense, the service provisioning platform (see Figure below) will be independent of the multiple access and transport networks that will be present in the ICiNG test-bed.
Furthermore, Community Administration services will be provided to the citizen on a diverse range of devices, providing much greater reach and accessibility to local government and their own community. This will be achieved through opening access to enabling mobile technologies to the local government IT infrastructure through open and standardised interfaces.
Mobile devices will play a central role in ICiNG since they are: (1) increasingly powerful multimedia, multimodal ICT platforms, (2) associated with positional data that is crucial to city planning and services and (3) truly ubiquitous. In addition, it is foreseen the deployment of an ad-hoc mesh network infrastructure to support both sensor and personal area networks. These networks will automatically configure themselves into dynamic topologies to support communication to and between citizens as they move within the cityscape and gather the necessary data to achieve accurate and efficient city planning.
Technically innovative research will advance the state of the art in the following areas:
- Access technology allowing seamless access and authentication across the diverse range of wireless, cellular, personal and fixed networks, including include DSL, 2.5G/3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and ZigBee.
- Contextual services, leveraging the contextual information provided by the network to dynamically adapt service according to user behaviour, service history, current situation, location and necessities.
- Dynamic ad-hoc & sensor mesh networks that automatically configure themselves into dynamic topologies.
- Geospatial Information Systems providing geospatial services as integrated web services, to any user and over any network. These services will be adapted to devices and also to the roles and profiles of service consumers via standard interfaces.
- Research into social and human factors to show which factors determine the usability and usefulness of services and interfaces, and to begin to understand the creation and behaviour of ‘e-Communities’.
ICING project will set up test-beds in high-profile European locations such as Dublin, Barcelona and Helsinki to act as ‘city laboratories’ for researching, evaluating and demonstrating technologies and services using intelligence in the environment.
