Concept of Ambient Network

In the networking world, what is the concept of ambient networks...?

Ambient Networks is a network integration solution to the modern-day problems of switching from one network to the other in order to keep in contact with the outside world.
This project aims to develop a network software-driven infrastructure that will run on top of all current or future network physical infrastructures to provide a way for devices to connect to each other, and through each other to the outside world.

The concept of Ambient Networks comes from the IST Ambient Network project

• Ambient Networks is a large-scale collaborative project within the European Union's Sixth Framework Program that investigates future communications systems beyond today's fixed and 3rd generation mobile networks.
• It is part of the Wireless World Initiative.
• The project works at a new concept called Ambient Networking, to provide suitable mobile networking technology for the future mobile and wireless communications environment.
• Ambient Networks aims to provide a unified networking concept that can adapt to the very heterogeneous environment of different radio technologies and service and network environments.
• Special focus is put on facilitating both competition and cooperation of various market players by defining interfaces, which allow the instant negotiation of agreements.
• This approach goes clearly beyond interworking of well-defined protocols and is expected to have a long-term effect on the business landscape in the Wireless World.
• The central focus to the project is the concept of composition of networks, which is an approach to address the dynamic nature of the target environment.
• The approach is based on an open framework for network control functionality, which can be extended with new capabilities as well as operating over existing connectivity infrastructure.

The internal of an Ambient Network is the ACS (Ambient Control Space).
It has the functions that can be accessed and it is in full control of the resources of the network.
The Ambient Networks infrasturcture does not deal with nodes, instead it deals with networks, though at the beginning, all the "networks" might only consist of just one node: these "networks" need to merge in order to form a network in the original sense of the word. A composition establishment consists of the negotiation and then the realization of a Composition Agreement. This merging can happen be fully automatic. The decision to merge or not is decided using pre-configured policies.

There are three interfaces present to communicate with an ACS.
These are:

• ANI: Ambient Network Interface. If a network wants to join in, it has to do so through this interface.
• ASI: Ambient Service Interface. If a function needs to be accessed inside the ACS, this Interface is used.
• ARI: Ambient Resource Interface. If a resource inside a network needs to be accessed (e.g. the volume of the traffic), this interface is used.

Interfaces are used in order to hide the internal structures of the underlying network.

If two networks meet, and decide to merge, a new ACS will be formed of the two (though the two networks will have their own ACS along with the interfaces inside this global, new ACS). The newly composed ACS will of course have its own ANI, ASI and ARI, and will use these interfaces in order to merge with other Ambient Networks.