Issues in the convergence of control with communication and computing: proliferation, architecture, design, services, and middleware

We anticipate that a possible next phase in the information technology revolution could be the convergence of control, i.e., sensing and actuation, with communication and computing. We address the broad set of issues that we believe to be important to the design, implementation, and proliferation of such systems. In particular, we expound on the topics of the architecture of such systems, methodologies for design, distributed time, services, and middleware. We describe our efforts in the Convergence Lab at the University of Illinois with respect to each of these topics.