Balancing transparency, efficiency and security in pervasive systems

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. While not the primary goal of pervasive computing, efficiency in resource management should be considered in order to best utilize a limited set of resources (bandwidth, computing, etc.) as to avoid congestion and avoid creating a visible and distracting bottleneck in the eyes of the user. As solutions to efficiently manage the resources in a pervasive computing environment, three techniques will be examined: the distributed caching and sharing of data between mobile hosts, the broadcasting of services by public service providers, and the ability for mobile hosts to adaptively adjust the quality of offered services. Likewise, security is often an afterthought in many computing projects, though it should be of high consideration in a pervasive environment where users share public resources to operate on private data. Specifically, how can a user be authenticated in this environment with minimal or no user intervention? Solutions such as single sign-on via smartcards and biometrics will be examined to carry out authentication in a pervasive environment. 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.