Pervasive Computing Concepts

School of Computer Science and Engineering

Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore

May 6, 2023
Ubiquitous (Pervasive) Computing

“The technology revolution will move into the everyday, the small
and the invisible ..., the most profound technologies are those that
disappear. They weave themselves into the fabrics of everyday life
until they are indistinguishable from it.” - Mark Weiser, 1991.
Motivating Example

“Dr. John is driving his car on a long distance trip. Along the way,
the car detects when fuel will be used up, and it then automatically
searches for gas stations nearby. In a short time, the car finds an
appropriate location that can provide fuel at the lowest price among
gas stations within 1 km. The pervasive device displays a suggestion
to John and guides him to the selected gas station. Two hours later,
it is lunch time and John is hungry. The pervasive devices search for
an appropriate restaurant near John’s current location, according to
his food preferences.”
Key Players in Ubiquitous Computing
Technologies that power the Ubiquitous Paradigm

▶ Internet of Things (IoT): From where do you “get” the data.

▶ Cloud/Fog/Edge: Where do you “store/process” the data.
▶ Artificial Intelligence (AI): How can you “generate” knowledge
from the stored data.
Challenges in Ubiquitous Computing

▶ Transparency: “ Pervasive computing is people-oriented,

providing transparent services based on individual
requirements, preferences, and so on. In contrast to desktop
computing, pervasive computing can use any device, in any
location, and in any format, without an individual being
consciously aware of what is taking place with respect to the
actual computing.”
Contd..

▶ Context Awareness: “Typically, pervasive computing

systems are very tightly connected with specific users.
Pervasive computing systems often gather and store
information on the user’s behavior, context, habits, and
planning. This information forms the basis for the many
benefits the system can offer individual users.”
Contd..

▶ Mobility: “The omnipresence of ubiquitous applications

typically is achieved by either having devices move with the
user or by having applications move among mobile users’
devices. In both cases, applications need to adapt to the
moving environment, which involves maintaining device
connections and adapting protocol for handling mobility.
Although some of the problems can be addressed by routing
and handovers, many cannot be solved at the network level
because knowledge of application semantics is required for
runtime adaptation.”
Contd..

▶ Heterogeneous devices: “Pervasive applications typically

involve many different types of devices working in an
orchestrated way. As a user moves around in an environment,
the servicing application often moves with him. For instance,
the application may switch from a desktop PC to a mobile
phone. In addition, the heterogeneous devices complicate the
development of high-level applications because different
devices provide varied programming interfaces, resource
abstractions, and functional capabilities.”
Contd..

▶ Data management: “In a pervasive environment, many

devices continuously produce huge amounts of raw data. It is
challenging to transfer, store, and process these data. In order
to provide meaningful semantics for high-level applications,
some preprocessing of the data may be necessary. For
instance, inaccurate data can cause context management
systems to produce false context information, which can result
in incorrect reasoning for applications.”
Contd..

▶ Fault tolerance: “The pervasive application requires

harmonious cooperation among many hardware devices and
various software components. However, hardware devices such
as sensors are prone to failures, and software components can
often malfunction. Both types of failures can hamper the
effectiveness of pervasive applications. Thus, fault tolerance
measures must be built into the system to avoid serious or
fatal consequences for users.”
Contd..

▶ Reliability: “Pervasive computing systems normally are

embedded in the environment not only for gathering
information but also for making decisions or at least for
decision support. Limited resources and unstable wireless
communication can impact the reliability of pervasive
computing, making its application a more arduous task.”
Contd..

▶ Usability: “Pervasive computing means that smart and agile

computing devices, though invisible, are embedded everywhere
in the environment. Therefore, usability is the critical success
factor for these applications, making this the hottest research
topic in the field of pervasive computing. An easy-to-use and
intuitive interface is the demand of the future [9]. Ease of use
will follow different levels for different end users. Usability in
pervasive computing applications is very important and
requires more attention than all other areas, such as desktop
and Web-based applications”
How many challenges can you figure out?
Example Scenario

“Professor Li is watching a video in his office using a personal

computer (PC) when he receives a call asking him to attend a
meeting. On his way there, John continues to watch the video
using his smartphone. A pervasive computing system will recover
the point in the video where John stopped watching it on his PC
and will automatically download a low-resolution video to John’s
smartphone (which has a low-resolution screen), connecting with
the video server through a low-bandwidth wireless channel. In this
case, the complex switch process is completely unnoticed by
Professor Li.”
Moore’s law

“Moore’s law is the observation that the number of transistors in an

integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years.”

“The form of Moore’s law, that a certain quantity y doubles every

x years, is sometimes used with other definitions of y. For example,
another often-used form of Moore’s law is: - the performance of
computer purchased at the same price doubles every 18 months, or:
- the areal density of transistors on a computer chip doubles every
2 years.”

“Moore’s prediction has been used in the semiconductor industry to

guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and develop-
ment, thus functioning to some extent as a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

1
From Wikipedia
Sequential Computing

“Sequential computing, also known as serial computation, refers to

the use of a single processor to execute a program that is broken
down into a sequence of discrete instructions, each executed one
after the other with no overlap at any given time. Software has
traditionally been programmed sequentially, which provides a
simpler approach, but is significantly limited by the speed of the
processor and its ability to execute each series of instructions. ”
Parallel Computing

“Parallel computing refers to the process of breaking down larger

problems into smaller, independent, often similar parts that can be
executed simultaneously by multiple processors communicating via
shared memory, the results of which are combined upon completion
as part of an overall algorithm. The primary goal of parallel
computing is to increase available computation power for faster
application processing and problem solving.”
Parallel Computing: Amdahl’s Law

“In computer architecture, Amdahl’s law is a formula which gives

the theoretical speedup in latency of the execution of a task at
fixed workload that can be expected of a system whose resources
are improved. It states that: - the overall performance
improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is
limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually
used.”
Contd ..

“Amdahl’s law is used in parallel computing to predict the

theoretical speedup when using multiple processors. For example,
if a program needs 20 hours to complete using a single thread, but
a one-hour portion of the program cannot be parallelized, therefore
only the remaining 19 hours of execution time can be parallelized,
then regardless of how many threads are devoted to a parallelized
execution of this program, the minimum execution time cannot be
less than one hour.”
Contd ..

Amdahl’s law can be formulated in the given way:

1
Speedup = ρ
(1 − ρ) +
ψ
▶ ρ = % of the execution time that may be subject to the
speedup
▶ The improvement makes the affected part ψ times as fast
Amdahl’s Law: Example

If 30% of the execution time may be the subject to the speedup, ρ

will be 0.3. If the improvement makes the affected part twice as
fast, ψ will be 2. Amdahl’s law states that the overall speedup of
applying the improvement will be:
1
Speedup = = 1.176470.
0.3
(1 − 0.3) +
2

What will be the speedup if 100% of the code can be parallelized?

Distributed Computing

“In Distributed Computing, multiple networked computers are used

to solve a problem. Distributed system components are located on
different networked computers that coordinate their actions by
using various networking and communication protocols.
Distributed computing allows those problems to be solved that
could not have be solved efficiently on a single computer because
of their required long processing times or large storage needs.
Distributed Computing allows larger problems to be solved quicker
than they would have been solved using a single computer.”
Distributed System Properties
Grid Computing

“ an analogy to power grids where users (or electrical appliances)

get access to electricity through wall sockets with no care or consid-
eration for where or how the electricity is actually generated. In this
view of grid computing, computing becomes pervasive and individ-
ual users (or client applications) gain access to computing resources
(processors, storage, data, applications, and so on) as needed with
little or no knowledge of where those resources are located or what
the underlying technologies, hardware, operating system, and so on
are.”

1
Jacob, Bart, et al. ”Introduction to grid computing.” IBM redbooks
(2005): 3-6.
Contd..

▶ The key values of Grid Computing are in virtualization;

virtualization across technologies, platforms, and
organizations.
▶ “An environment that provides the ability to share and
transparently access resources across a distributed and
heterogeneous environment not only requires the technology
to virtualize certain resources, but also technologies and
standards in the areas of scheduling, security, accounting,
systems management, and so on.”
Benefits of Grid Computing

▶ Exploiting under utilized resource: “The machine on which

the application is normally run might be unusually busy due to
a peak in activity. The job in question could be run on an idle
machine elsewhere on the grid.”
▶ Parallel CPU capacity: “... that the applications have been
written to use algorithms that can be partitioned into
independently running parts. A CPU-intensive grid application
can be thought of as many smaller subjobs, each executing on
a different machine in the grid. To the extent that these
subjobs do not need to communicate with each other, the
more scalable the application becomes. A perfectly scalable
application will, for example, finish in one tenth of the time if
it uses ten times the number of processors. ”
Contd..

▶ Virtual resources/organization for collaboration: “Sharing

starts with data in the form of files or databases. A data grid
can expand data capabilities in several ways. First, files or
databases can span many systems and thus have larger
capacities than on any single system. Sharing is not limited to
files, but also includes other resources, such as specialized
devices, software, services, licenses, and so on. These
resources are virtualized to give them a more uniform
interoperability among heterogeneous grid participants”
Contd..

▶ Access to Additional Resources: “... if a user needs to

increase their total bandwidth to the Internet to implement a
data mining search engine, the work can be split among grid
machines that have independent connections to the Internet.
In this way, total searching capability is multiplied, since each
machine has a separate connection to the Internet. If the
machines had shared the connection to the Internet, there
would not have been an effective increase in bandwidth.”
Contd..

▶ Resource Balancing: “A grid federates a large number of

resources contributed by individual machines into a large
single-system image. For applications that are grid-enabled,
the grid can offer a resource balancing effect by scheduling
grid jobs on machines with low utilization. This feature can
prove invaluable for handling occasional peak loads of activity
in parts of a larger organization.”
Contd..

▶ Reliability: “The systems in a grid can be relatively

inexpensive and geographically dispersed. Thus, if there is a
power or other kind of failure at one location, the other parts
of the grid are not likely to be affected. Grid management
software can automatically resubmit jobs to other machines
on the grid when a failure is detected. In critical, real-time
situations, multiple copies of important jobs can be run on
different machines throughout the grid. Their results can be
checked for any kind of inconsistency, such as computer
failures, data corruption, or tampering.”
Contd..

▶ Management: “The goal to virtualize the resources on the

grid and more uniformly handle heterogeneous systems will
create new opportunities to better manage a larger, more
distributed IT infrastructure. It will be easier to visualize
capacity and utilization, making it easier for IT departments
to control expenditures for computing resources over a larger
organization.”
Cloud Computing

“Cloud computing is on-demand access, via the internet, to

computing resources - applications, servers (physical servers and
virtual servers), data storage, development tools, networking
capabilities, and more - hosted at a remote data center managed
by a Cloud Services Provider (or CSP). The CSP makes these
resources available for a monthly subscription fee, or bills them
according to usage.”

1
https://www.ibm.com/topics/cloud-computing
Contd ..

“Compared to traditional on-premises IT, and depending on the

cloud services you select, cloud computing helps do the following:
▶ Lower IT costs: Cloud lets you offload some or most of the
costs and effort of purchasing, installing, configuring, and
managing your own on-premises infrastructure.
▶ Improve agility and time-to-value: With cloud, your
organization can start using enterprise applications in minutes,
instead of waiting weeks or months for IT to respond to a
request, purchase and configure supporting hardware, and
install software. Cloud also lets you empower certain users:
specifically developers and data scientists to help themselves
to software and support infrastructure.
Contd ..

▶ Scale more easily and cost-effectively: Cloud provides

elasticity: instead of purchasing excess capacity that sits
unused during slow periods, you can scale capacity up and
down in response to spikes and dips in traffic. You can also
take advantage of your cloud provider’s global network to
spread your applications closer to users around the world.”

There are other paradigms like Fog and Edge, that are also popular
in the modern day.
Location in Ubiquitous Computing

“Location awareness enables mobile devices to determine their posi-

tion and for content such as local services to adapt to the position.
The most common location aware devices are stand alone map based
devices such as SatNav (satellite GPS navigation) devices that dis-
play the positions, routes and location specific services over map
views.”
Contd ..

“We can distinguish two types of location awareness: longer range

mobility based location awareness and static, short range location
awareness. Location awareness is considered by its proponents to
be one of the main drivers for mobile communication, e.g., person
or business asset tracking and navigation. Here the focus is on
long range tracking of the position of a moving asset in relation to
a destination position along a preset route to the destination.
Static location awareness involves dynamically discovering services
such as a meeting place or tagged personal items such as keys and
library books, etc. within a locality.”
Contd ..

“Sensors for specific physical world phenomena are statically

embedded into specific devices and services, rather than being
network enabled. For example, a heating system can switch
heating on if the temperature drops, light sensors can switch lights
on when it gets dark and sprinkler systems can water the garden
periodically if it does not rain.”
Context Aware Computing

“Context aware systems are systems that are aware of their

situation (or context) in their physical, virtual (ICT) and user
environment, and can adapt the system to this in some way,
benefiting from knowledge of that situation. For example, in the
personal memories scenario, the camera can detect the distance of
the camera to the subject of the photo and automatically adapt
the focus of a camera lens when recording the image.”
Some More Definitions for Context

▶ “ ... define context as: any information that can be used to

characterise the situation of an entity that is considered
relevant to the interaction between a user and an application”
▶ “... a more concrete definition of context is to define it as a
member from the set of context types, such as location,
identities of nearby people, objects and changes to those
objects...”
Context-Aware System Properties
Wearable Computing

“The applications for wearable computers include: monitoring the

human body’s physiological functions, the distance walked, route
taken, and projecting hands free information for viewing.”

“Wearable: - devices such as accessories and jewellery that are

usually operated hands free and operate autonomously. For e.g.,
watches, that act as personal information managers, earpieces that
act as audio transceivers, glasses that act as visual transceivers and
contact lenses. These are low resource devices”
Contd..

“Gestures: Gestures are expressive, meaningful body motions

involving physical movements of the fingers, hands, arms, head,
face, or body, with the intent of conveying meaningful information
about interacting with the environment. There are three main
types of body gestures: hand and arm gestures, head and face
gesture, and full body movement. Gestures can be sensed using:
wearable devices such as gloves or body suits; by attaching sensors
such as various magnetic field trackers, accelerometers and
gyroscopes to the surface of the body; by using cameras and
computer vision techniques.”
The Structure and Elements of Pervasive Computing Systems.
General Architecture
Infrastructure and Devices

“Pervasive computing environments consist of a large number of

devices embedded everywhere in our living environment. We
classify devices in the infrastructure layer into computing devices,
sensor devices, and network devices according to their
functionalities. [Think of this as more of an interplay between the
three entities.]”
Contd ..

▶ “Computing devices in a pervasive computing environment

provide the capability of information processing. For example:
Traditional desktop machines, laptops, personal digital
assistant (PDAs), and newer Pads and smartphones.
Additionally, many objects (such as vehicles containing
embedded CPUs) are also computing devices.”
Contd ..

▶ “Sensors and actuators represent devices that can sense or

mediate between physical and virtual environments. Sensors
collect information such as temperature, location, humidity,
light, sound, and tension from the environment. Actuator act
on control signals.”
Contd ..

▶ “Network devices provide wired or wireless network access to

connect different devices together in a virtual environment.
Due to the variety of wireless technologies, we see many
devices using Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, infrared, Zigbee, Long Term
Evolution (LTE), Near Field Communication (NFC), and
Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID). ”

▶ “The goal of pervasive computing is to create ambient

intelligence 1 . To make this vision a reality, interconnected
wireless networks play a vital role in collecting context
information, providing essential communication support for
information flow, and in processing in a dynamically changing
environment.”

1
1
1
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_intelligence
Middleware for Pervasive Computing Systems
Key Concerns and Issues!

▶ “Pervasive applications use many devices of various types.

Coordination and management of these devices are nontrivial
tasks. Considering the resource constraints of these devices,
applications may need to address frequent failures due to
energy or memory size limitations”
Contd..
Key Concerns and Issues!

▶ “Sensor devices continuously collect a large amount of raw

data about users and the environment. These raw data
require efficient storage management and processing in order
to provide meaningful context information for high-level
applications. Sensor data are often noisy and conflicting,
which requires data processing to filter most false events and
keep all crucial events. High-level reasoning must be able to
process events with tolerance for inconsistent low-level events”
Contd..
Key Concerns and Issues!

▶ “The applications need context information in order to

provide a better user experience. For instance, a personal
health assistant needs to know if the user has had lunch so
that it can choose to remind the user to take certain pills [like
diabetic medication] at a specific time”
Contd..
Key Concerns and Issues!

▶ “Pervasive applications need to adapt to the moving

environment, which involves the maintenance of connections
with devices and protocol adaptation for handling mobility.”
Contd..
Why is Middleware Needed?

“Some of the problems [concerns and issues described in previous

slides] can be solved by routing and handovers. However, many
problems cannot be solved at the network level because knowledge
of application semantics is required for runtime adaptation.”
Contd..
Why is Middleware Needed?

“The pervasive middleware is responsible for abstracting resources

provided by underlying heterogeneous devices and providing a
unified interface for high-level applications. The middleware hides
the complexity and heterogeneity of underlying hardware and
network platforms, eases the management of system resources, and
makes the execution of applications more predictable.”
Contd..
Middleware: Resource Management

“ Pervasive applications require a seamless orchestration of a large

body of heterogeneous sensors, devices, components, and services
that may dynamically join or leave. To better support these
applications, pervasive middleware needs to efficiently manage
sensors and actuating devices, despite the diverse functionality of
underlying technologies and vendors. Key functions of resource
management include resource registration, resource control, and
resource abstraction.
Contd..
Middleware: Resource Management

▶ Resource registration is a mechanism for providing a yellow

page registry for the discovery, manipulation, and integration
of essential resources in the system, such as sensors and
actuators. For pervasive applications, automatic discovery and
the binding of system resources can greatly facilitate the
system services and ease the effort of configuring,
administering, and operating complex system resources.
Contd..
Middleware: Resource Management

▶ Resource control is the management of various sensor and

actuator resources in the system. Once resources are
registered with the system, the middleware establishes control
over these sensors and actuators for obtaining their states and
for issuing control commands to them. Additionally, the
middleware connects different devices so that they can
communicate with each other via messages. The middleware
also schedules resource usage throughout the system and
potentially supports a large number of users.
Contd..
Middleware: Resource Management

▶ Resource abstraction allows other components in the

middleware or application to use system resources, especially
when users or devices move in that space.”
Contd..
Middleware: User Tracking

“Pervasive applications need to adapt their behavior to moving

users. In order to do this, pervasive applications need an efficient
user tracking method that can identify user positions and trails.
Two types:
▶ For an outdoor environment:
1. A GPS is used for obtaining position information, where that
position information is calculated by measuring the distance
between the GPS receiver and three or more GPS satellites.
2. For mobile phones, a similar location sensing technique has
been developed by using Global System for Mobile
communication (GSM) signals.
3. Video surveillance often is used in many cities to cover selected
areas that typically need to be watched by humans or
monitored by sophisticated computer vision software.
Contd..
Middleware: User Tracking

▶ For an indoor environment:

1. Indoor location sensing uses many wireless technologies, such
as infrared, Bluetooth, and ultrasonic.
2. Vision-based schemes capture videos to locate objects by vision
recognition techniques and have achieved widespread usage.
3. A [low-cost] RFID-based application attaches RFID tags to
targeted objects beforehand. Then, either RFID readers or
targeted objects move in space. When the tagged objects are
within the accessible range of RFID readers, the information
stored in the tags is emitted and received by readers. Thus,
the reader knows the objects are within a nearby range.”
Contd..
Middleware: Context Management

“Context refers to the high-level information of an entity, which

can be a person, a place, or an object that is relevant to the
interaction between a user and pervasive applications. Contexts
can be classified into different categories, such as physical contexts
of light, noise, and temperature, and user contexts of identities,
social relationships, and activities. Context management includes
context acquisition, context representation, and context reasoning.
Contd..
Middleware: Context Management

▶ Context acquisition is the process of collecting low-level

information from various sensing sources. Such information is
often captured via sensing devices. For instance, special
sensors can gather information on temperature, magnetism,
pressure, light, sound, and other chemical or mechanical
properties. Actuators can collect information on motion and
orientation. More complex sensors can capture images on
videos of a targeted object. Finally, software sensors can
report the I/O usage and network statistics on computers,
pads, and smartphones.
Contd..
Middleware: Context Management

▶ Context representation refers to a formal description of the

semantics of a context. For efficient processing of collected
context information, we need to define structures of context
information. Over the past decades, many different types of
context representations have been developed, such as
key-value pairs, logic-based models, object-oriented models,
markup language models, and ontology-based models.
Contd..
Middleware: Context Management

▶ Context reasoning is the process of inferring high-level implicit

context information from low-level explicit context
information. [The reasoning can be exact or fuzzy]. ”
Contd..
Middleware: Service Management

“The middleware is typically structured as a number of services for

a good reason. Services provide a much higher level of abstractions
than those from the infrastructure layer. With carefully
constructed services, pervasive applications easily can be built by
directly invoking different services or service compositions. As a
result, the middleware often supports mechanisms for efficient
service management, including service registration and discovery,
and service composition.”
Contd..
Middleware: Data Management

“Data management provides permanent data storage for pervasive

applications. For pervasive applications, there are many mobile
devices that are connected in a highly dynamic and ad hoc
manner. As a result, data management must consider many issues,
such as frequent change of data sources in terms of location and
time, constant network disconnection among devices, and
inconsistency of data.”
Contd..
Middleware: Data Management

Note:
▶ Pervasive applications have many different types of data
sources, and storing a large amount of heterogeneous data is a
nontrivial task. In addition, because many data sources exist,
it is often necessary to resolve redundancy and inconsistency
among collected data. The spatial and temporal properties of
the data, as well as different data formats, make managing
context data from different sources difficult.
Contd..
Middleware: Data Management

Note:
▶ Sensing data in a pervasive environment changes frequently,
which can result in cascading updates among related data
items. This is because a data item can share multiple
contextual relationships (e.g., spatial, temporal, and social)
with other items. Changing a single item causes updates of
related items, which in turn results in further updates.
Considering the unreliable communication layer, updating
data items can be a challenging task.
Contd..
Middleware: Data Management

Note:
▶ Both data producers and data consumers in a pervasive
environment are more dynamic than in a WSN. They can join
and leave the system at will, whereas sensor nodes in a WSN
are often fixed and of the same type. Thus, pervasive
applications have to work with unreliable and varied sensors.
Contd..
Middleware: Data Management

The key function of data management is to provide seamless data

access for pervasive applications. At the same time, certain Qual-
ity of Service (QoS) of data access should be provided in terms of
latency, availability, and consistency. More specifically, data man-
agement not only stores a large amount of heterogeneous data but
also efficiently maintains a contextual relationship among data ob-
jects.
Contd..
Middleware: Security Management

“Security and privacy are important issues for pervasive

applications because of the exposure of plenty of personal
information, The traditional security problems include
confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Confidentiality ensures
that the users’ data are not exposed to unauthorized users.
Integrity maintains data without unauthorized alterations.
Availability denotes the data are accessible when required.
Pervasive applications introduce some more challenging security
issues due to an [their] extremely volatile nature: - devices can join
and leave arbitrarily, and communication links are often changing.
In practice, systems often need to strike the right balance between
security and privacy requirements and application requirements.
For example, many pervasive applications require users’ location
information to provide location-based services, such as finding a
nearby ATM machine. However, disclosing the location information
may raise serious privacy concerns. ”
Contd..
Middleware: Security Management

“Common security mechanisms, such as access control and user

authentication, are required in the ubiquitous environment. In recent
years, new security mechanisms such as voice recognition and facial
recognition have appeared for enhanced user experiences.”