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A New Compositional Adaptation Technique for Pervasive
Computing Abstract “Pervasive computing” is widely regarded as a new revolution in information technologies. The main characteristic of pervasive computing which sets it apart from the other paradigms is that: Everything, from the device used, resources available, network bandwidth, to environmental context, can change drastically at run-time. From a computing environment’s perspective, we could say that things in pervasive computing flow more quickly and in more directions than traditional distributed computing. It is therefore imperative for software systems and applications to be able to adapt to these changes on the fly, in order to provide a suitable and relatively stable working environment for the users. In this talk, I will present our Sparkle project, which is a component-based software infrastructure with a special compositional adaptation technique, called functionality adaptation, to support context-aware pervasive computing. Instead of a monolithic chunk, an application is assembled from disparate code components, called facets, which are brought in from the network and can be dynamically recomposed for execution in accordance with the current context (e.g., locality, resource constraints, user’s preference). With functionality adaptation, a pervasive computing system is expected to be most flexible and adaptive, and can significantly enhance the mobility of pervasive applications. The talk concludes with our experiences on building the Sparkle system and suggestions for future research. |