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ABSTRACT
Pervasive computing is an environment in which computers can be embedded as part of
any product or process, and communicate with each other and traditional enterprise
systems.
The core components of pervasive technology, embedded and networked
modules, are not revolutionary in a society that has seen chips placed into everything
from automobiles to refrigerators. What is new and distinguishes the paradigm of
pervasive computing is the emergent behavior of these devices to create a fabric of
computing that adapts around the user.
Despite the core principle of pervasive computing being to create this fabric of
computing, the majority of research today focuses on finding the next killer application,
centering on designing individual applications of pervasive computing. This paper
presents a framework for the creation of pervasive computing environments as whole,
and demonstrates that in order to successfully create an environment; bottom-up design
methods must be used.
By using complexity theory as the bottom-up framework, seven characteristics to create a
successful pervasive computing environment are presented. The paper will present a
through overview of the field of pervasive computing and the framework used by IT
architects and developers to bring their departments into the pervasive paradigm.
Keywords:
Pervasive
Computing,
Frame work,
Principles, Nodes, and Emergent Behavior.
INTRODUCTION
In what would turn out to be the founding vision of
pervasive computing, in a 1991 publication, then
Xeroxs Palo Alto Research Centers chief
technology officer Mark Weiser painted a world
where technologies weave themselves into the fabric
of everyday life", indistinguishing themselves and
their information from physical space [1]. Today, in
the spirit of Weiser's vision, the National Institute of
Standards and Technology states that pervasive
computing is, (1) numerous, casually accessible,
often invisible computing devices, (2) frequently
mobile or embedded in the environment, (3)
connected to an increasingly ubiquitous network
structure."[1] These three attributes shift the focus of
the computer age from computers to computing,
the core paradigm change that will be caused by
pervasive computing.
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Design
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1.
STATE OF THE ART OF PERVASIVE
COMPUTING
Not surprisingly, Mark Weisers research team failed
in its 1991 attempt to implement their vision. The
last decade, however, has brought a culture
embracing pervasive technology as well as technical
advancements to meet demands.
1.1
Business Drivers
Turkish mass transit riders once purchased 45 different kinds of passes to board some part of the public transportation network, causing
commonality and logistics nightmares for city officials and headaches from having to hold and sort through the various types of tokens for transit
customers. To conquer this, Turkish engineers looked to pervasive computing to find an intelligent token that could store proper cash amounts,
wirelessly deduct differing fares when swiped for various forms of transit, and be small and durable enough for everyday use. As a result, 1.4
million key fobs, which hold embedded chips to keep track of money deposited, were issued to users, and is today the only form of token used
throughout the Turkish mass transit system [8].
Singapore's Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) system uses radio frequencies (2.54 GHz band) to connect with smart cards inside vehicles. When a
user enters a highway, sensors on the road deduct a given amount of money from the smart card. The amount of money deducted is determined
by an algorithm that adjusts payments based on traffic speed (thus, when vehicle speeds are slow, the price increases, and lessening further
traffic). It should be noted that the algorithm does not change in real time, but trends traffic-data and updates charges every 3 months. Violators'
(those without enough cash on their smart card) license plates are immediately photographed and have a summons to court automatically
generated. Overall, it is a good example of multiple wireless, embedded devices and bottom up control. [9].
Mexican Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha and 160 of his employees, all who work at the anti-crime information center in Mexico
City, had rice-grain-sized RFIDs chips implanted in their arms for authorization into the building and to manage future security issues.
Figure 1: Some real-life examples of pervasive computing in the market place today
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1.2
Technology Drivers
Figure 2: The future forecasts and challenges of the technical components of pervasive computing
1.2.1
Embedded microcontroller:
While most media attention focuses on Moore's law
and the fast growth of computing power (in 2000, a
mobile phone had more processing capacity and
memory than a mainframe did in the 1960s), generalpurpose microcontrollers used in pervasive oriented,
embedded spaces are technically characterized by
balancing processing needs with lower power
consumption, wireless methods of connectivity, hard
timing constraints, and small size [10].
An
examination of laptop processors demonstrates the
stride microcontrollers have made towards enabling
small devices with large computing power.
The
mobile Pentium III allows the processor to run at
300MHz when the notebook is running on its battery,
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Scalability
Technical
Heterogeneity
Integration
Invisibility
Future Growth of
Pervasive
Computing
Security
Privacy
Societal
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Mass Usage
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Figure 3: The issues and challenges affecting the growth of pervasive computing
1.3.1
Technical:
The technical barriers to pervasive computing are
well document, and are in many ways a continuation
of the challenges traditionally associated with mobile
and distributed systems.
The following four
principles are summarized from two monumental
papers [22], [24]:
1.3.1.1 Scalability The expected proliferation of
users, devices, and networks will greatly strain the
computing environment. By the numbers, by 2005,
machine-to-machine technologies will create 35
billion microcontrollers and 750 million smart
sensors that all demand to be connected to a
pervasive network [25]. This proliferation creates
stresses to the development and distribution of
pervasive applications. In development, recreating
application logic for each new device to be added, as
is often done today in mobile computing, it would be
impossible to meet demand.
In deployment,
explicitly installing each of the billions of
applications will also clearly be impossible.
1.3.1.2 Heterogeneity The availability of
resources will differ across locations, thus creating
noticeable differences in computing, detracting from
users being able to depend on pervasive technology
and not allowing computing to fade out of the user's
consciousness.
For instance, a university and a
highway may have vastly different "smartness".
Mobile computing has made great strides in hiding
differences in coverage from the user, and
middleware can use similar ideas to manage network
resources. At the application layer, however, the
challenge still remains on developing application that
can run regardless of the platform.
1.3.1.3 Integration Even more difficult to manage
than the growth of devices and users are the
interactions between all the components of pervasive
computing.
Coordination is needed for message
routing and sharing of resources, as well as data
integrity. In addition, cooperation is needed to allow
a system-level optimization to best adjust to the user.
Finally, capacity must be increased (for example on
servers) to handle growth. The methods by which this
challenge is solved will have implications on
reliability, quality of service, invisibility and security
implications.
1.3.1.4 Invisibility While Weiser used the term
invisibility; Satyanarayanan gives a more practical
technical goal of minimal user distraction. For the
most part, environments and nodes should be able to
tune themselves, such as dynamic network
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Aggregation
Network of
Networks,
aggregation of
networks
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FTP
Napster (P2P)
Linux
Network of
Nodes
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SETI@home (largest
distributed computing
project in history)
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Tagging
Every website
Every file has Every file and user
has special
has a tag - URL's, a tag and
Every group of every location identification
websites has a tag has a tag
- .edu, .com You
can search by
tag - Google,
Yahoo!
Every Linux
instance has a
unique
identification
Nonlinearity
Growth of the
Internet users is
exponential
Users grew
rapidly and
fell rapidly
with P2P
Linux Kernel
Number of users grew
distribution grew exponentially and then
exponentially
tapered
between 1990 and
2001
Flows
Linux is based on
free information
flow can make a
better OS
Diversity
Clearly,
diversified by
users base and
information
Can send
Technology has been
nearly any file used in open source
code to music to
subscription services
Internal
Models
If we see a single
website as an
agent, many can
predict demand
and adjust around
users. Amazon
for example, can
recommend
choices and adapt
based on users
with internal,
expert system
rules
Building
Blocks
TCP/IP
TCP/IP
The different
flavors of Linux all
came from the
same internal
kernel
TCP/IP + varying
technologies
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Holland's
Complexity
Attributes
Implementation
Related
Challenge/Issue
Aggregation
Integration, Privacy
Tagging
Nonlinearity
Scalability
Flows
Invisibility, Cost
Effectiveness
Diversity
Heterogeneous nodes are considered the norm, but Adaptable applications that expect
differences must not be apparent to the user
change and irregularity
Heterogeneity
Internal Models
Invisibility
Building Blocks
Scalability, Cost
Effectiveness
Figure 5: Complexity theory can generate design principles for the creation of pervasive computing
environments
3.1
Aggregation:
All complex systems portray the property of
aggregation, a term that has two meanings depending
at the level from which it is viewed 1. At the agent
level, aggregation is a form of categorization that lets
each individual agent cope with its environment.
From the behavior of these agents, patterns of
organization emerge that lead to hierarchical
organization; for instance a city is made up of its
1
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3.4
Flows:
All complex systems contain methods for its agents
to interact and exchange information. Clearly, by the
paradigms definition, Weiser's vision demands the
flow of information between nodes to create a
pervasive computing environment.
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3.6
Internal Models:
Every agent in a complex system follows internal
rules that produce certain behaviors and guide
interactions with its environment. For instance, in an
ecosystem, every creature has rules that help it find
food and avoid hazards. Implicit models are hardwired rules of behavior, while explicit rules are
representations, stored in memory, that allow an
agent to explore alternatives to each situation. These
models act on information from the environment, and
thus are a large part of the field of context sensitivity,
or a software system's ability to sense and analyze
context from various sources [41].
In pervasive
computing, both mechanisms of internal models must
be in each device application to allow it to adjust and
adapt around the user.
Implicit models are implemented through hardware at
the transistor level, while explicit models can be
implemented by software states. For example, an
internal model may contain a rule to use as little
power as needed.
This can be hardwired at the
transistor level, with designs that have less leakage of
electricity and less distance for current to travel have
decreased power consumption, such as Motorolas
MC9328MX1 with Dual Vt and Well-biasing [42].
Conversely, more complex architectures can be
created that contain states that provide a given
service level with needed energy consumption.
Using intelligent software, these states can be
selected based on lowest power needed for a certain
task [10].
Both explicit and implicit models can help solve the
problems of invisibility, with adjusting services
provided and tuning themselves without user
intervention. Furthermore, as complex environments
continue to grow and nodes become more
autonomous, the ability to predict all the possible
scenarios that a node will encounter will be greatly
reduced. To keep systems reliable, internal models
will be depended on to ensure that a task operates
correctly. Thus, the creation of internal models is a
key principle in pervasive computing.
3.7
Building Blocks:
The final characteristic seen in every complex system
is building blocks or simple components that
combine to produce diverse agents. This mechanism
can be seen in the human body, where similar cells
combine to produce vastly different human beings. It
should also be noted that natural selection limits the
number of random combinations of these blocks to
direct behavior in all systems. Thus to truly create a
pervasive environment, building blocks are needed to
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4.
CONCLUSIONS
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5.
REFERENCES
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