Beyond ubiquitous computing: The Malaysian HoneyBee project for Innovative Digital Economy

• Research focuses on ensemble computing beyond ubiquitous distributed computing.
• HoneyBee project applies ensemble computing in Malaysian Innovative Digital Economy.
• Proposed layered platform enabling new ensemble computing requirements.
• Platform supports ad-hoc, peer-to-peer communication model with safety measures.
• Platform introduces Enhanced Intelligent Multi-Agent System concept as exemplar.

In the proposed advanced computing environment, known as the HoneyBee Platform, various computing devices using single or multiple interfaces and technologies/standards need to communicate and cooperate efficiently with a certain level of security and safety measures. These computing devices may be supported by different types of operating systems with different features and levels of security support. In order to ensure that all operations within the environment can be carried out seamlessly in an ad-hoc manner, there is a need for a common mobile platform to be developed. The purpose of this long-term project is to investigate and implement a new functional layered model of the common mobile platform with secured and trusted ensemble computing architecture for an innovative Digital Economic Environment in the Malaysian context. This mobile platform includes a lightweight operating system to provide a common virtual environment, a middleware for providing basic functionalities of routing, resource and network management, as well as to provide security, privacy and a trusted environment. A generic application programming interface is provided for application developers to access underlying resources. The aim is for the developed platform to act as the building block for an ensemble environment, upon which higher level applications could be built. Considered as the most essential project in a series of related projects towards a more digital socio-economy in Malaysia, this article presents the design of the target computational platform as well as the conceptual framework for the HoneyBee project.