Ubiquitous availability of network connectivity and computing platforms is laying the foundation for a fully connected cyber-physical world. In cyber-physical world we will monitor and optimise all the pragmatic aspects of our society and introduce a new, digital, dimension in how we interact with people and the environment.
If properly exploited, this innovation has the potential to (1) greatly improve our use of key resources, such as energy, (2) reduce pollution, (3) improve life in highly congested metropolis, (4) improve our security, and (4) innovate the way in which we interact with the cyber-physical world, administrations, companies and friends.
Examples applications often envisioned are:
Smart Grid and Energy Management, where real-time information about the production & consumption of energy is used to route energy and control energy consumption profiles for appliances connected to the grid.
Smart Transport where real-time information about traffic & weather conditions is used to optimise the flow and utilisation of both public and private transport; minimising pollution and ensuring the most time effective journey for citizens.
These applications share one common need—the necessity to ubiquitously distribute and access real-time information from, and across, a vast variety of devices, ranging from embedded sensors to mobile devices. While the problem of ubiquity is solved at a computing and network connectivity level, it is by no means solved with respect to (1) real-time, and (2) resource efficient (e.g. battery life and network), data distribution.
Project Cirrus addresses precisely this gap. It introduces a set of technologies that complement and perfectly integrate with state of the art devices to enable highly scalable, efficient, ubiquitous, real-time and cloud-ready data distribution across a large set of embedded devices and mobile platforms.