Pervasive Computing




Everything must be Synched

The concept of pervasive computing is that you should be able to access and interact with all of your data in a location independent manner. However, such an architecture would require something like the "Google Grid" and therefore your "network" profile, based on your data, is also available. Through smart associations (difficult to achieve), the goal is to provide an "environmental" context to your data and this will lead the way to something called location based services (look this up in google).

The challange is to fully integrate the "environmental" sensor into the network. "Sensor" networks are the next big thing in networking and they will significantly change the world, if they can actually be made to work.

Environmental Sensor Node that is about the size of a film cannister

Example output of an environmental sensor:

One important characteristic of sensor networks is the need to reduce energy consumption per device. The industry goal is to power an individual WSN (wireless sensor node) for one year on a pair of AA batteries.

This basically means that handheld devices can be used to activate any particular service or good that your interested in acquiring. The commercial world will love this because consumers already shop by association. The net effect of this will be huge. Consumers will simply part with their money (or actually increase their credit card debt) much more easily as the "association" network suddenly stocks their current location with their preferences.

This infrastructure, however, opens the door to service rates that are metered.

Evolution over time looks something like this:

We are clearly now in Stage 3 and halfway toward stage 4.

That is, most of you already have a computer in addition to some mobile device that is almost a computer (e.g. PDA/Cell Phone). At the very least its a network device.

Stage 5 is not that far off:

The behavior of pervasive computing depends critically on the degree to which individual devices can become smart, networked devices that are reliable . This is referred to as the Toaster Down Problem.

To reach that goal, several challanges need to be overcome.

The Future?

The core challenge:

Automatic identification of physical objects is key to coupling atoms (physical entities) to bits (information). RFID and sensor networks are the enablers and foundation layer of this vision. However, the raw data must be "understood" so that salient "events" can be extracted from the data stream

RFID is a very big deal