Building pervasive applications: research challenges and envisioned solutions

Pervasive computing systems typically consist of multiple devices and software entities that are capable of interacting with one another. Various types of software-equipped devices may be available for various purposes, such as interacting with the real environment, providing display and control services to users, or exposing data and application interfaces to other devices. The main challenge of the pervasive computing domain is to provide coherent pervasive environments, offering useful applications and services, based on an entanglement of heterogeneous, distributed and dynamic devices and software services, communicating via various technologies and protocols. The main research challenges in this domain include: Distribution, Heterogeneity, Plural Authority Cohabitation, Security, Privacy, Scalability, and Managing the Evolution of the Execution Context. This last challenge covers several research issues such as: Dynamism, Context awareness, Mobility, and Autonomic Computing. This talk concludes by providing some background on service oriented component technology that seems promising to provide a coherent framework dealing with all these challenges.