An intelligent context-aware communication system for one single autonomic region to realize smart living

Abstract

Wireless communication plays an important role in smart living applications. People can use mobile devices to access various kinds of services via various wireless technologies such as Zigbee, RFID (Radio Frequency Identity). Conventional smart living applications tend to be designed for convenience while ignoring essential restrictions. Actually, ubiquitous communication is the privilege of authorized users in some places for specific requirements and reasons. For example, a nursing attendant may be issued a handset to communicate with a patient’s family in the hospital while unauthorized communication is not allowed to prevent the handset from being misused by the nursing attendant. Principles for essential restrictions should be determined and put into practice by an administrator within a predefined region, which is defined to be single autonomic region. In this paper, an intelligent context-aware communication system is proposed to provide ubiquitous communication under location and communication party restrictions to realize smart living in one single autonomic region. We design the system by integrating heterogeneous communication technologies and one novel security protocol, double-lock protocol. We implement the designed system with an ARM-based processor on the embedded system experimental board DMA-2440XP and two pluggable modules, GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) and GPS (Global Positioning System). In the designed communication system, only legal users can use a legitimate communication device to communicate with legal ones within the authorized area.