A first step towards a dependability framework for smart environment applications

Smart environments will consist of a large number of heterogeneous devices that communicate to collaboratively perform various tasks for users. We propose a novel depend- ability framework to increase availability and reliability of smart environment applications. We argue that the key step in achieving high dependability is to predict faults before they occur. Many statistical fault prediction techniques have been proposed for smart environment applications. Selecting the best one among these techniques involves performance assessment and detailed comparison on given metrics. We present a linear regression- based prediction model to predict the remaining battery lifetime of a device to prevent faults due to low battery. Further, we dis- cuss the proposed dependability framework, the basic approaches and the corresponding mechanisms to achieve our long-term research goal. We envision that dependability framework will reduce maintenance costs of large-scale smart environments and increase the dependability of smart environment applications. Keywords-smart environments; dependability; fault-prediction; battery fault-prediction model; linear regression.