Monitoring of ambient systems: a challenge: [a position paper for the Somitas workshop at Ambi-Sys 2008]

This short position paper is about ambient systems in the sense of what is known in a research domain usually called ambient intelligence: communicating and mostly wireless electronic and advanced computerized components, sometimes called ambient devices1. We propose to consider the gap between today's monitoring systems for networked computing systems and what is needed for ambient systems. One of the challenges, for instance, is to create performing techniques: the monitoring system needs to periodically get information from the monitored one and the performance of the global system dramatically decreases when the frequency of the catching processus increases. Another challenge is related to time synchronization, as this problem is still not fully solved for current monitoring systems. The behavior of ambient systems is likely to be context-aware and much more dynamical than current systems: several problems occur and need new answers. From a light survey of works related to network monitoring we try to give here some material for a workshop discussion.