Abstract
The e-services have introduced a significant wave of change in communication patterns around the world. Such e-services are capable of intelligent interaction and are able to discover and negotiate with each other, mediate on behalf of their users and reconfigure themselves into services that are more complex. In this chapter, the author explores the future opportunities and its applications of ambient eservice. Contrast to traditional e-business service delivery method, their proposed service focus on the bottom-up collaborative approach that enables e-business participants to cooperate with nearby users and encourage information sharing and experience co-creation. The notion of ambient e-service is defined to identify a new scope of mobile e-service, which address dynamic collective efforts between mobile users (enabled by Mobile Peer-to-Peer technology), dynamic interactions with ambient environments (envisioned by Location-Based Service), the moment of value (empowered by wireless technologies), and low cost service provision. Several ambient e-service application scenarios will be introduced in the following sections.
TopOverview Of Ambient E-Service
The improved portability and battery life make it possible for mobile users can make use of almost the same range of services as desktop users. Emerging ubiquitous computing that utilizes and integrates pervasive, wireless, embedded, wearable and/or mobile technologies to bridge the gaps between the digital and physical worlds. Ubiquitous computing envisions a world of fully connected devices, with cheap wireless networks everywhere. The ambient e-services are similar to applications on mobile ad-hoc networks, which are a collection of autonomous peers or terminals that communicate with each other over relatively bandwidth-constrained wireless links. Ambient intelligence is a way of subtly gathering information from an environment and acting on it (Curtis et.al, 2009).
Key Terms in this Chapter
M-P2P: With the advance in mobile wireless communication technology and the increasing number of mobile users. M-P2P involves applying p2p principles and supporting p2p applications in mobile wireless networks.
Ambient e-Service: a new scope of mobile e-service, which address dynamic collective efforts between mobile users, dynamic interactions with ambient environments, the moment of value, and low cost service provision.
Sensor network: A sensor network is a group of specialized transducers with a communications infrastructure intended to monitor and record conditions at diverse locations. The sensors could be hard-wired or wireless, and they are used to cooperatively monitor environmental conditions.
Context: Context is the set of environmental states and settings that either determines an application’s behavior or in which an application event occurs and is interesting to the user.
P2P: (Peer-to-Peer) Files can be shared directly between systems on the network without a central server. Each peer becomes a file server as well as a client on the P2P network.
LBS: Location-based services employ knowledge of the user’s location to enable the provision of new or enhanced services to a user via a wireless handheld device