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To be successful, pervasive computing requires a balance of computing, design, and business requirements to be considered throughout the design process. Achieving this synthesis requires a level of interdisciplinary design that is not present in current pervasive design tools. To understand the state of the art and provide insight to future tool designers, the purpose of this paper is to present a survey of design tools for pervasive computing and consider their ability to be used in interdisciplinary design.

The authors have performed a survey of tools covering many areas within pervasive computing and have evaluated the abilities of each tool with established metrics for pervasive design tools.

While the paper has found many design tools are available for constructive pervasive applications, few are suitable through all phases of the design cycle or useful across all the intended application domains of pervasive computing.

This survey provides an understanding of the state of pervasive design tools, with regards to interdisciplinary design, which has not previously been performed. Additionally, the authors provide evaluations of the pervasive tools when used in an interdisciplinary setting. These evaluations provide insight to key metrics and allow tool designers to understand the needs of their intended audience.

A decade and a half after the debut of pervasive computing, a large number of prototypes, applications, and interaction interfaces have emerged. However, there is a lack of consensus about the best approaches to create such systems or how to evaluate them. To address these issues, this paper aims to develop a performance evaluation framework for pervasive computing systems.

Based on the authors' experience in the Gator Tech Smart House – an assistive environment for the elderly, they established a reference scenario that was used to guide the analysis of the large number of systems they studied. An extensive survey of the literature was conducted, and through a thorough analysis, the authors derived and arrived at a broad taxonomy that could form a basic framework for evaluating existing and future pervasive computing systems.

A taxonomy of pervasive systems is instrumental to their successful evaluation and assessment. The process of creating such taxonomy is cumbersome, and as pervasive systems evolve with new technological advances, such taxonomy is bound to change by way of refinement or extension. This paper found that a taxonomy for something so broad as pervasive systems is very complex. It overcomes the complexity by focusing the classifications on key aspects of pervasive systems, decided purely empirically and based on the authors own experience in a real‐life, large‐scale pervasive system project.

There are currently no methods or frameworks for comparing, classifying, or evaluating pervasive systems. The paper establishes a taxonomy – a first step toward a larger evaluation methodology. It also provides a wealth of information, derived from a survey of a broad collection of pervasive systems.

Context awareness is one of the key aspects of pervasive computing systems. In such systems, a plethora of dynamic context information needs to be constantly retrieved, soundly interpreted, rapidly processed, maintained in various repositories, and securely disseminated. Thus, a flexible, scalable and interoperable context representation scheme needs to be established and solid context management mechanisms need to be adopted, which will perform well in large‐scale distributed pervasive systems. This paper elaborates on the COMPACT context middleware that has been designed to cope with the issues above and saturate pervasive computing environments with context awareness functionality.

In the vision of pervasive computing, numerous heterogeneous devices, various information services, and users performing daily activities are physically co‐located in a environment. How can we coordinate the services and devices to assist a particular user in receiving a particular service so as to maximize the user’s satisfaction? To solve this human‐centered coordination issue, we propose an agent‐based service coordination framework for pervasive computing. It is called location‐aware middle agent framework. The middle agent takes account of the user location in cognitive way (based on location‐ontology), and determines best‐matched services for the user. Based on this coordination framework, we have developed a multi‐agent architecture for pervasive computing, called CONSORTS (Coordination System of Real‐world Transaction Services). In this paper, we first outline some requirements of the human‐centered service coordination in pervasive computing. Secondly, we describe location‐aware middle agent framework to fill the requirements. Lastly, we outline CONSORTS, an prototype of location‐aware middle agent framework, and two applications of CONSORTS, location‐aware information assistance services in a museum and wireless‐LAN based location systems on FIPA agent Networks.

As Pervasive Computing environments become more richly populated with sensors and computing power it may be possible for the environment to observe and interpret user actions and pre‐emptively provide accurate support for those actions. This requires accurate inference of user intent. Though individual user acts may be inferable from environmental context sensing, the inference of intent for which appropriate support might be offered is more challenging. Numerous researchers have used probabilistic techniques such as Bayesian Analysis techniques to attempt such inference. Unlike a desktop environment, however, pervasive computing environments are extremely heterogeneous, so any heuristics used must be tailored to the physical environment and the users in question. Thus these techniques are only likely to be accurate if configured with accurate knowledge of routine user behavior. Many existing approaches attempt to learn such knowledge from operational data, but this often requires user involvement in training and expert configuration of probabilistic processing structure. In this paper we examine a complimentary approach where users are presented with an intuitive interface to support the direct configuration of probabilistic structure by users with appropriate knowledge. By treating an intent inference system for a particular pervasive computng environment as an autonomic system, we approach the problem as the design of an intuitive governance interface for this system. We then present the design and usability evaluation of this governance interface.

Pervasive computing environments such as a pervasive campus domain, shopping, etc. will become commonplaces in the near future. The key to enhance these system environments with services relies on the ability to effectively model and represent contextual information, as well as spontaneity in downloading and executing the service interface on a mobile device. The system needs to provide an infrastructure that handles the interaction between a client device that requests a service and a server which responds to the client's request via Web service calls. The system should relieve end‐users from low‐level tasks of matching services with locations or other context information. The mobile users do not need to know or have any knowledge of where the service resides, how to call a service, what the service API detail is and how to execute a service once downloaded. All these low‐level tasks can be handled implicitly by a system. The aim of this paper is to investigate the notion of context‐aware regulated services, and how they should be designed, and implemented.

The paper presents a detailed design, and prototype implementation of the system, called mobile hanging services (MHS), that provides the ability to execute mobile code (service application) on demand and control entities' behaviours in accessing services in pervasive computing environments. Extensive evaluation of this prototype is also provided.

The framework presented in this paper enables a novel contextual services infrastructure that allows services to be described at a high level of abstraction and to be regulated by contextual policies. This contextual policy governs the visibility and execution of contextual services in the environment. In addition, a range of contextual services is developed to illustrate different types of services used in the framework.

The main contribution of this paper is a high‐level model of a system for context‐aware regulated services, which consists of environments (domains and spaces), contextual software components, entities and computing devices.

The purpose of this paper is to characterise a number of current and future computing environments and summarises their resource discovery requirements. It then seeks to analyse, with respect to the requirements of each environment, several established service discovery protocols and some newer protocols that are still in the research domain. In addition, the key features of a new resource discovery protocol that has been developed to operate with heterogeneous computing environments are described.

A comprehensive literature survey was undertaken, highlighting the shortcomings of existing resource discovery protocols with respect to large pervasive computing environments. Given the identified gaps in existing protocols, an alternative protocol is suggested.

The main findings of this paper relate to the identified shortcomings of existing resource discovery protocols. It was also found that a hybrid resource discovery protocol capable of spanning dynamic, mobile computing environments and more stable ones was able to overcome many of the challenges presented by large‐scale pervasive computing environments.

This paper presents comprehensive literature survey of the state‐of‐the‐art in resource discovery protocols, pointing out some of the problems that are not solved. The paper describes the design of an alternative protocol, and presents an evaluation of it. The pervasive computing research community can draw upon the survey and evaluation to guide the design of future resource discovery protocols for the increasingly dynamic world in which we live.

Pervasive computing environment allows the users to access the services anywhere and anytime. Due to the dynamicity, mobility, security, heterogeneity, and openness have become a major challenging task in the Pervasive computing environment. To solve the security issues and to increase the communication reliability, an authentication-based access control approach is developed in this research to ensure the level of security in the Pervasive computing environment.

This paper aims to propose authentication-based access control approach performs the authentication mechanism using the hashing, encryption, and decryption function. The proposed approach effectively achieves the conditional traceability of user credentials to enhance security. Moreover, the performance of the proposed authentication-based access control approach is estimated using the experimental analysis, and performance improvement is proved using the evaluation metrics. It inherent the tradeoff between authentication and access control in the Pervasive computing environment. Here, the service provider requires authorization and authentication for the provision of service, whereas the end-users require unlinkability and untraceability for data transactions.

The proposed authentication-based access control obtained 0.76, 22.836 GB, and 3.35 sec for detection rate, memory, and time by considering password attack, and 22.772GB and 4.51 sec for memory and time by considering without attack scenario.

The communication between the user and the service provider is progressed using the user public key in such a way that the private key of the user can be generated through the encryption function.

This paper aims to demonstrate that a policy-based middleware solution which facilitates the development of context-aware applications and the integration of the heterogeneous devices should be provided for ubiquitous computing environments. Ubiquitous computing targets the provision of seamless services and applications by providing an environment that involves a variety of devices having different capabilities. These applications help transforming the physical spaces into computationally active and smart environments. The design of applications in these environments needs to consider the heterogeneous devices, applications preferences and rapidly changing contexts. The applications, therefore, need to be context-aware so that they can adapt to different situations in real-time.

In this paper, we argue that a policy-based middleware solution that facilitates the development of context-aware applications and the integration of the heterogeneous devices should be provided for ubiquitous computing environments. The middleware allows applications to track items and acquire contextual information about them easily, reason about this information captured using different logics and then adapt to changing contexts. A key issue in these environments is to allow heterogeneous applications to express their business rules once, and get the preferred data once they are captured by the middleware without any intervention from the application side.

Our middleware tackles this problem by using policies to define the different applications’ rules and preferences. These policies can specify rules about the middleware services to be used, type of data captured, devices used, user roles, context information and any other type of conditions.

In this paper, we propose the design of a flexible and performant ubiquitous computing, and context-aware middleware called FlexRFID along with its evaluation results.

A novel distributed middleware service platform, called MidGate platform, is presented in this paper. The central contribution is description of the developed MidGate platform and its architecture focusing especially on the adaptation, context‐awareness, and personalization of mobile and pervasive services. The research problem addressed is how to facilitate the development of interoperable applications and services into heterogeneous and distributed service gateway based environments. A requirement analysis of future mobile and pervasive services and key technologies has been carried out to establish a solid base and requirements for the development of the MidGate platform. The key mechanisms supporting adaptation, context‐awareness, and personalization of applications and services are presented. The novel middleware architecture solution of the MidGate platform utilizing these key mechanisms is also described. The MidGate architecture utilizes the emerging Generic Service Elements (GSE) approach, where generic and collectively utilizable services are provided to applications as middleware services that are part of a service platform. The main contribution of this research is the definition of a set of GSEs, the related MidGate platform architecture and its evaluation. The evaluation of the MidGate platform has been carried out in series of laboratory prototypes. The evaluation indicates that the MidGate platform solution is well applicable in various service gateway‐based distributed systems and extends well into resource‐constrained mobile environments.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of advances in pervasive computing.

The paper provides a critical analysis of the literature.

Tools expected to support these advances are: resource location framework, data management (e.g. replica control) framework, communication paradigms, and smart interaction mechanisms. Also, infrastructures needed to support pervasive computing applications and an information appliance should be easy for anyone to use and the interaction with the device should be intuitive.

The paper shows how everyday devices with embedded processing and connectivity could interconnect as a pervasive network of intelligent devices that cooperatively and autonomously collect, process and transport information, in order to adapt to the associated context and activity.

A cyber world (CW) is a digitized world created on cyberspaces inside computers interconnected by networks including the Internet. Following ubiquitous computers, sensors, e‐tags, networks, information, services, etc., is a road towards a smart world (SW) created on both cyberspaces and real spaces. It is mainly characterized by ubiquitous intelligence or computational intelligence pervasion in the physical world filled with smart things. In recent years, many novel and imaginative researches have been conducted to try and experiment a variety of smart things including characteristic smart objects and specific smart spaces or environments as well as smart systems. The next research phase to emerge, we believe, is to coordinate these diverse smart objects and integrate these isolated smart spaces together into a higher level of spaces known as smart hyperspace or hyper‐environments, and eventually create the smart world. In this paper, we discuss the potential trends and related challenges toward the smart world and ubiquitous intelligence from smart things to smart spaces and then to smart hyperspaces. Likewise, we show our efforts in developing a smart hyperspace of ubiquitous care for kids, called UbicKids.

The purpose of this paper is to explore characteristics of human‐computer interaction when the human body and its movements become input for interaction and interface control in pervasive computing settings.

The paper quantifies the performance of human movement based on Fitt's Law and discusses some of the human factors and technical considerations that arise in trying to use human body movements as an input medium.

The paper finds that new interaction technologies utilising human movements may provide more flexible, naturalistic interfaces and support the ubiquitous or pervasive computing paradigm.

In pervasive computing environments the challenge is to create intuitive and user‐friendly interfaces. Application domains that may utilize human body movements as input are surveyed here and the paper addresses issues such as culture, privacy, security and ethics raised by movement of a user's body‐based interaction styles.

The paper describes the utilization of human body movements as input for interaction and interface control in pervasive computing settings.

Emerging pervasive computing scenarios require open service frameworks promoting situated and self‐adaptive behaviors, and supporting diversity in services and long‐term evolvability. This suggests adopting a nature‐inspired approach, where pervasive services are modeled and deployed as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices. However, there are many possibly nature‐inspired metaphors that can be adopted, and choosing one may require a careful analysis of the pros and cons of the different metaphors. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the key requirements and desiderata for next generation pervasive computing services and associated infrastructures.

In this paper, the authors introduce and critically analyze a number of natural metaphors that can be adopted to realize these concepts and survey relevant proposals in the area.

The key result of this survey is that a uniform reference architecture can be a useful guide when framing the challenges involved in the design and implementation of future self‐adaptive pervasive service ecosystems.

The survey in this paper, along with the proposed reference architecture, can be effective starting points towards the definition and implementation of general‐purpose nature‐inspired pervasive service ecosystems.

The key purpose of this paper is to overview the many issues related to the integration of social sensing and pervasive sensing in the support of adaptive context-aware services.

From the analysis of existing proposals and prototypes, the authors found out that the process of integrating social and pervasive sensing can follow a limited number of approaches, which enables the authors to properly frame the proposals existing in the literature (and/or available as prototype infrastructures) according to a simple taxonomy, which is very useful to make the survey much more effective than a simple list of systems and proposals.

The taxonomy shows that, when integrating social sensing with pervasive sensing, it is possible, at one extreme, to exploit social network as a mere source of information and have such information flow towards the infrastructure supporting the execution of pervasive computing services. At the other extreme, it is possible exploiting a social network as an infrastructure for the integration, by having data from pervasive devices flow towards social networks. In between the extremes, different means can consider to have social networks and pervasive infrastructures converge towards each other to enable the integration of social and pervasive sensing.

Besides introducing the main concepts related to social sensing and framing the key approaches that can be undertaken to pursue the integration with traditional pervasive sensing, the authors go further discussing open issues and key research challenges behind their seamless integration.

Pervasive computing envisions seamless support for user tasks through cooperating devices that are present in an environment. Fluctuating availability of devices, induced by mobility and failures, requires mechanisms and algorithms that allow applications to adapt to their ever‐changing execution environments without user intervention. To ease the development of adaptive applications, Becker et al. (3) have proposed the peer‐based component system PCOM. This system provides fundamental mechanisms to support the automated composition of applications at runtime. In this article, we discuss the requirements on algorithms that enable automatic configuration of pervasive applications. Furthermore, we show how finding a configuration can be interpreted as Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problem. Based on this, we present an algorithm that is capable of finding an application configuration in the presence of strictly limited resources. To show the feasibility of this algorithm, we present an evaluation based on simulations and real‐world measurements and we compare the results with a simple greedy approximation.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a view on situation, activity and goal awareness (SAGAware) in ubiquitous computing. It discusses these concepts, articulates their roles in scalability and prevalence of pervasive applications, and speculates the future development.

The paper is a visionary essay that introduces the background, elaborates the basic concepts and presents the authors' views and insights into SAGAware research in pervasive computing based on the latest state of the art of the development of pervasive computing and its applications.

SAGAware is closely related to the levels of automation and large‐scale uptake of pervasive applications. It is an interdisciplinary research area requiring collaboration and cooperation of multiple research communities.

The paper highlights the importance of the SAGAware research and further points out research trends and future research directions.

The paper helps stimulate research interests and draw attention of relevant researchers to this promising research area.

The paper pioneers the investigation of an increasingly important research theme, and presents an in‐depth view to its potentials and research trends.

Mobile devices have received much research interest in recent years. Mobility raises new issues such as more dynamic context, limited computing resources, and frequent disconnections. A middleware infrastructure for mobile computing must handle all these issues properly. In this project we propose a middleware, called 3DMA, to support mobile computing. We introduce three requirements, distribution, decoupling and decomposition as central issues for mobile middleware. 3DMA uses a space based middleware, which facilitates the implementation of decoupled behavior and support for disconnected operation and context awareness. This is done by defining a set of “workers” which are able to act on the users behalf either: to reduce load on the mobile device, and/or to support disconnected behavior. In order to demonstrate aspects of the middleware architecture we then consider the development of a commonly used mobile application.

The impact of Ubiquitous Computing on Learning is not confined within technical dimension. Besides its technical facilitation, this new computing paradigm also challenges human’s belief on learning, and compels us to rethink on the design of learning resources and environments. The paper explores the concept of Ubiquitous Learning, and proposes a conceptual framework for a Ubiquitous Learning Environment (ULE) design and implementation. A ULE is established on the combination between Real World and Virtual Space, Personal Space and Shared Space. Learning in a ULE is conducted in the interactions among three essential communicative elements: Social Human, Object in real world, and Artifact in virtual space. A learning process is a social transfer process between tacit and explicit knowledge. Context‐Awareness is indispensable to all kinds of interactions in a ULE. In particular, this paper gives a discussion to context‐awareness supported Interoperability and Adaptability in a ULE, and suggests a five‐dimensional (Who, What, How, When, Where) representation approach for modeling context and providing context‐awareness information. In the practical dimension, this paper presents a design framework for a ULE implementation by integrating the applications of present affordable learning devices, such as networked PCs (Personal Computer), PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant), mobile phones, sensors, and RFIDs. A basic learning system architecture in a ULE and a prototype ubiquitous language learning system are also addressed in this paper.

Ideally, a pervasive location‐based system should allow mobile users to go anywhere and benefit from personalized and pro‐active services tailored for their current activity. However, existing location‐based systems are still far from this vision, as they are either aimed at very specific activities or too generic to provide real value to specific user activities. The objective of this work is to identify and characterize the most fundamental challenges involved in the design of pervasive location‐based systems. The approach is based on the idea that such challenges will correspond to the key design tradeoffs for location‐based systems. Building on what is believed to be the high‐level requirements for a truly pervasive locationbased system, this paper proposes a design space with four design dimensions: functional scope, added‐value, pro‐activity, and adaptability. After analyzing a representative set of location‐based systems under that design space, the combinations between functional scope and any of the other dimensions are identified as the main contradictions in the design of such systems. The paper finally discusses the research challenges associated to the identified tradeoffs.