Review: Infrastructure for Pervasive Computing: Challenges

This paper enumerates the challenges faced today to design an infrastructure for pervasive computing.
Their conceptual model is based on four components: devices, users, software components and users interface.
In the following paragraph a summary of the challenges related to the naming and addressing issues of devices and software components.

Devices:

• Heterogeneity is expected to increase in the future, devices will include sensors and everyday objects such as watches, shoes etc. Those devices will require to interact despite differences in resources (hardware and software capabilities). An infrastructure is needed to manage the integration of those devices in the system.
  

• Mobility is faced to problems related to maintaining connectivity while devices move between networks (See IP mobile section). Disconnected networks can be handled by replicated data.

Software Components:

• Mobility and distribution: since users are mobile they can access several devices simultaneously. Mechanisms should enable the mobility and distribution of software. The support for distribution need to be extended to address mobility, synchronization and coordination between software components. Platforms like CORBA offers only transparency of distributed communication.

• Context awareness: applications will rely more on context knowledge than information based on user's input.

• Adaptation: The infrastructure should be able to facilitate adaptation such as reconfiguring software components, binding, adding, removing components.

• Interoperability: applications will be required to respond to new tasks and situations. Applications would be dynamically assembled from existing and available components. Those components should acquire knowledge of each other's interfaces and behavior to interact with other unknown heterogeneous components.

• Component discovery has been addressed in many research areas. Resource discovery is supported by a type management repository which maintains descriptions of service interface types. Another solution is addressed by network directory protocols such as LDAP. As resource discovery tried to solve the problem differently, the main challenge would be to integrate the different approaches into a scalable resource discovery by mapping requests between resource discovery domains.

• Scalability: the increasing number of devices and softwares requires a powerful scalable software platform on which distributed components will be built on.

The following paragraph presents existing approaches in the domain of service platforms:
Service platforms allow the rapid creation and deployment of services, as well dynamic service discovery.
JINI based on Java and RMI. Services can be added and removed dynamically.
JINI proposes among others a look up service used by clients to locate services.

MOCA aims to satisfy requirements of mobile environments. It provides dynamic service discovery, limited forms of adaptation to changes due to mobility, support for device heterogeneity.
JINI and MOCA provides solution to small scale environments.

The NINJA service framework addresses large scale services. Service discovery is supported by hierarchical arrangement of service discovery services.



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