Towards Fault Tolerant Pervasive Computing

Pervasive computing envisions an environment that seamlessly integrates digital and physical devices. Users can access digital data and applications from the environment as easily as accessing them through their computers. Since pervasive computing exists in the user's environment, the technology is sustainable if it is invisible to the user and does not intrude the user's consciousness [3]. This requires that functioning of the multitude of devices in the environment be oblivious to the user. Therefore, the system has to be resilient to various kinds of faults and should be able to function despite faults. In this paper, we discuss various classes of failures, their implications to pervasive computing and the challenges to be addressed in designing a fault tolerant pervasive computing system. We also describe our prototype fault tolerant pervasive system and propose future directions.