Adaptive Composition of Distributed Pervasive Applications in Heterogeneous Environments

Abstract

Complex pervasive applications need to be distributed for two main reasons: due to the typical resource restrictions of mobile devices, and to use local services to interact with the immediate environment. To set up such an application, the distributed components require spontaneous composition. Since dynamics in the environment and device failures may imply the unavailability of components and devices at any time, finding, maintaining, and adapting such a composition is a nontrivial task. Moreover, the speed of such a configuration process directly influences the user since in the event of a configuration, the user has to wait. In this article, we introduce configuration algorithms for homogeneous and heterogeneous environments. We discuss a comprehensive approach to pervasive application configuration that adapts to the characteristics of the environment: It chooses the most efficient configuration method for the given environment to minimize the configuration latency. Moreover, we propose a new scheme for caching and reusing partial application configurations. This scheme reduces the configuration latency even further such that a configuration can be executed without notable disturbance of the user.