Balancing transparency, efficiency and security in pervasive systems

Abstract: This chapter will survey pervasive computing with a look at how its constraint for transparency affects issues of resource management and security. The goal of pervasive computing is to render computing transparent, such that computing resources are ubiquitously offered to the user and services are proactively performed for a user without his or her intervention. The task of integrating computing infrastructure into everyday life without making it excessively invasive brings about tradeoffs between flexibility and robustness, efficiency and effectiveness, as well as autonomy and reliability. As the feasibility of ubiquitous computing and its real potential for mass applications are still a matter of controversy, this chapter will look into the underlying issues of resource management and authentication to discover how these can be handled in a least invasive fashion. The discussion will be closed by an overview of the solutions proposed by current pervasive computing efforts, both in the area of generic platforms and for dedicated applications such as pervasive education and healthcare.