Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Green Pervasive and Ubiquitous Systems

The papers in this special section focus on green pervasive and ubiquitous computing. These computing systems are a promising paradigm in human’s daily life, which enables computation, storage, and communications services to appear everywhere and anytime. It requires seamless integration and interaction of heterogeneous and complex systems, ranging from a variety of local smart yet resource-constrained devices to remote powerful cloud platforms. Such a pervasive ecosystem not only depends on performance-oriented system infrastructures and ubiquitous computing/networking technologies, but also faces critical energy-efficiency issues, exemplified by controlling the tremendous power consumption, electricity cost, and carbon-emission of large-scale datacenter systems, as well as prolonging the limited battery lifetime of mobile devices in broad Internet applications. Therefore, new energy aware architectures, emerging systems-of-systems and related techniques, such as mobile-cloud computing, virtualization, and scheduling of renewable energy resources, are increasingly drawing development efforts from both academia and industry, in order to shape an environmentally sustainable “Green” world for the next decade. Due to the challenging open issues, green pervasive and ubiquitous systems deserve academic attentions from the interdisciplinary aspects of information systems, computing and networking optimizations, energy control, and engineering technologies.