Instrumenting the physical world with pervasive networks

This paper addresses the challenges and opportunities of instrumenting the physical world with pervasive networks of sensor-rich, embedded computation. Such systems will fulfill two of Weiser’s key objectives—ubiquity by injecting computation into the physical world with high spatial density, and invisibility by having the nodes and collectives of nodes operate autonomously, without explicit human input. Of particular importance to the technical community is to make such pervasive computing itself pervasive. We need reusable building blocks that allow us to move away from specialized instrumentation of each particular environment and toward building reusable techniques for sensing, computing, and manipulating the physical world. We present taxonomy of emerging systems and challenges and outline the enabling technological developments.