Pervasive Computing Middleware

Pervasive computing envisions applications that provide intuitive, seamless and distraction-free task support for their users. To do this, the applications combine and leverage the distinct functionality of a number of devices. Many of these devices are invisibly integrated into the environment. The devices are equipped with various sensors that enable them to perceive the state of the physical world. By means of wireless communication, the devices can share their perceptions and they can combine them to accurate and expressive models of their surroundings. The resulting models enable applications to reason about past, present and future states of their context and empower them to behave according to the expectations of the user. This ensures that they provide high-quality task support while putting only little cognitive load on users as they require only minimal manual input. To provide a truly seamless and distraction-free user experience, the applications can be executed in a broad spectrum of vastly different environments. Thereby, the require only little manual configuration since they can autonomously adapt and optimize their execution depending on the capabilities of the environment. In many cases, changes to the environment are compensated with little impact on the support provided by the application. Failures are handled transparently and the capabilities of newly available devices are integrated on-the-fly. Given this or similarly ambitious visions, pervasive applications are very attractive from a user’s perspective. In essence, they simply promise to offer more sophisticated and more reliable task support for everyone, everywhere. From an