This post is the reading notes of the following paper:

Mahadev Satyanarayanan, Pervasive Computing: Vision and Challenges, IEEE Personal Communications, 8, 2001:10-17.

Abstract

It then identifies four new research thrusts: effective use of smart spaces, invisibility, localized scalability, and masking uneven conditioning.

1. Introduction

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” So began Mark Weiser’s seminal 1991 paper [44] that described his vision of ubiquitous computing, now also called pervasive computing.

This body of knowledge spans many areas that are foundational to pervasive computing and is now well codified in textbooks [8, 19, 20]: - remote communication, including protocol layering, remote procedure call [3], the use of timeouts, and the use of end-to-end arguments in placement of functionality [28]. - fault tolerance, including atomic transactions, distributed and nested transactions, and two-phase commit [13]. - high availability, including optimistic and pessimistic replica control [9], mirrored execution [4], and optimistic recovery [37]. - remote information access, including caching, function shipping, distributed file systems, and distributed databases [30]. - security, including encryption-based mutual authentication and privacy [23].

Although many basic principles of distributed system design continued to apply, four key constraints of mobility forced the development of specialized techniques. These constraints are[31]:

  1. unpredictable variation in network quality
  2. lowered trust and robustness of mobile elements,
  3. limitations on local resources imposed by weight and size constraints,
  4. and concern for battery power consumption.

Mobile computing has the following borad areas:

  1. mobile networking
  2. mobile information access
  3. support for adaptative applications
  4. system-level energy saving techniques
  5. location sensitivity

We characterized a pervasive computing environment as one saturated with computing and communication capability, yet so gracefully integrated with users that it becomes a ‘‘technology that disappears.’’

3. Example Scenarios

4. Drilling Down

5. Conclusion

BibTeX of the paper

@article{satyanarayanan2001pervasive,
	author = {Mahadev Satyanarayanan},
    title = {Pervasive Computing: Vision and Challenges},
	journal = {IEEE Personal Communications},
    year = {2001},
    volume = {8},
	pages = {10--17},
    doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/98.943998}
}