Social issues of power harvesting as key enables of WSN in pervasive computing

Pervasive systems have gained popularity and open the door to new applications that will improve the quality of life of the users. Additionally, the implementation of such systems over an infrastructure of Wireless Sensor Networks has been proven to be very powerful. To deal with the WSN problems related to the battery of the elements or nodes that constitute the WSN, Power Harvesting techniques arise as good candidates. With PH each node can extract the energy from the surrounding environment. However, this energy source could not be constant, affecting the continuity and quality of the services provided. This behavior can have a negative impact on the user's perception about the system, which could be perceived as unreliable or faulty. In the current paper, some related works regarding pervasive systems within the home environment are referenced to extrapolate the conclusions and problems to the paradigm of Power Harvesting Pervasive Systems from the user perspective. Besides, the paper speculates about the approach and methods to overcome these potential problems and presents the design trends that could be followed.<br/

A Semantic Approach for Description and Ranked Matching of Services in Pervasive Environments

With the recent developments in technology, new and diverse devices are being introduced into the pervasive world. This has raised new challenges for the discovery of devices and their services in dynamic environments. The existing approaches such as Jini [AOSJ99], UPnP [UPnP06], etc., describe services at a syntactic level and the matching mechanisms in these approaches are limited to syntactic comparisons based on attributes or interfaces. In order to overcome the limitations of these approaches, there has been an increasing interest in the use of Semantic Web technologies to support the description and matching of services. This paper proposes a semantic matching framework to facilitate effective discovery of device based services in pervasive environments. This offers a ranking mechanism that will order the available services in the order of their suitability; the evaluation of the experimental results have indicated that the results correlate well with human perception

A Semantic Framework for Priority-based Service Matching in Pervasive Environments

The increasing popularity of personal wireless devices has raised new demands for the efficient discovery of heterogeneous devices and services in pervasive environments. The existing approaches such as Jini [1], UPnP [8], etc., describe services at a syntactic level and the matching mechanisms in these approaches are limited to syntactic comparisons based on attributes or interfaces. In order to overcome the limitations in these approaches, there has been an increased interest in the use of semantic description and matching techniques to support effective service discovery. This paper proposes a semantic matching approach which facilitates the discovery of device-based services in a pervasive environment; the approach provides a ranking facility that orders services according to their suitability and also considers priorities placed on individual requirements in a request during the matching process. The evaluation studies have shown that the matcher results correlate reasonably well with human judgement

A Pragmatic Approach for the Semantic Description and Matching of Pervasive Resources

The increasing popularity of personal wireless devices has raised new demands for the efficient discovery of heterogeneous devices and services in pervasive environments. With the advancement of the electronic world, the diversity of available services is increasing rapidly. %This raises new demands for the efficient discovery and location of heterogeneous services and resources in dynamically changing environments. Traditional approaches for service discovery describe services at a syntactic level and the matching mechanisms available for these approaches are limited to syntactic comparisons based on attributes or interfaces. In order to overcome these limitations, there has been an increased interest in the use of semantic description and matching techniques to support effective service discovery. In this paper, we present a semantic matching approach to facilitate the discovery of device-based services in pervasive environments. The approach includes a ranking mechanism that orders services according to their suitability and also considers priorities placed on individual requirements in a request during the matching process. The solution has been systematically evaluated for its retrieval effectiveness and the results have shown that the matcher results agree reasonably well with human judgement. Another important practical concern is the efficiency and the scalability of the semantic matching solution. Therefore, we have evaluated the scalability of the proposed solution by investigating the variation in matching time in response to increasing numbers of advertisements and increasing request sizes, and have presented the empirical results

A general purpose programming framework for ubiquitous computing environments

It is important to note that the need to support ad-hoc and potentially mobile arrangements of devices in ubiquitous environments does not fit well within the traditional client/server architecture. We believe peer-to-peer communication offers a preferable alternative due to its decentralised nature, removing dependence on individual nodes. However, this choice adds to the complexity of the developers task. In this paper, we describe a two-tiered approach to address this problem: A lower tier employing peer-to-peer interactions for managing the network infrastructure and an upper tier providing a mobile agent based programming framework. The result is a general purpose framework for developing ubiquitous applications and services, where the underlying complexity is hidden from the developer. This paper discusses our on-going work; presenting our design decisions, features supported by our framework, and some of the challenges still to be addressed in a complex programming environment

Domain Objects and Microservices for Systems Development: a roadmap

This paper discusses a roadmap to investigate Domain Objects being an adequate formalism to capture the peculiarity of microservice architecture, and to support Software development since the early stages. It provides a survey of both Microservices and Domain Objects, and it discusses plans and reflections on how to investigate whether a modeling approach suited to adaptable service-based components can also be applied with success to the microservice scenario

An Autonomic Cross-Platform Operating Environment for On-Demand Internet Computing

The Internet has evolved into a global and ubiquitous communication medium interconnecting powerful application servers, diverse desktop computers and mobile notebooks. Along with recent developments in computer technology, such as the convergence of computing and communication devices, the way how people use computers and the Internet has changed people´s working habits and has led to new application scenarios. On the one hand, pervasive computing, ubiquitous computing and nomadic computing become more and more important since different computing devices like PDAs and notebooks may be used concurrently and alternately, e.g. while the user is on the move. On the other hand, the ubiquitous availability and pervasive interconnection of computing systems have fostered various trends towards the dynamic utilization and spontaneous collaboration of available remote computing resources, which are addressed by approaches like utility computing, grid computing, cloud computing and public computing. From a general point of view, the common objective of this development is the use of Internet applications on demand, i.e. applications that are not installed in advance by a platform administrator but are dynamically deployed and run as they are requested by the application user. The heterogeneous and unmanaged nature of the Internet represents a major challenge for the on demand use of custom Internet applications across heterogeneous hardware platforms, operating systems and network environments. Promising remedies are autonomic computing systems that are supposed to maintain themselves without particular user or application intervention. In this thesis, an Autonomic Cross-Platform Operating Environment (ACOE) is presented that supports On Demand Internet Computing (ODIC), such as dynamic application composition and ad hoc execution migration. The approach is based on an integration middleware called crossware that does not replace existing middleware but operates as a self-managing mediator between diverse application requirements and heterogeneous platform configurations. A Java implementation of the Crossware Development Kit (XDK) is presented, followed by the description of the On Demand Internet Computing System (ODIX). The feasibility of the approach is shown by the implementation of an Internet Application Workbench, an Internet Application Factory and an Internet Peer Federation. They illustrate the use of ODIX to support local, remote and distributed ODIC, respectively. Finally, the suitability of the approach is discussed with respect to the support of ODIC