CSR-EHS: Novel Mobile and Distributed Embedded Systems for Pervasive Computing Applications

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

Pervasive computing systems are on the brink of revolutionizing our world - computation will be embodied in everyday objects, not 'traditional' computers, and will seamlessly enhance our lives. This embedding, and cost considerations, suggest that pervasive computing applications will consist of a dynamic set of system components (smart objects) executing on a distributed fabric consisting of shared storage, computing, and sensing resources, adapting to environmental changes, and opportunistically cooperating and exploiting third party services. At the same time, RFID technologies continue their fast paced evolution towards enabling cost effective embedding of tags, storage (i.e., read/write memories) and thus context within the environment and 'space' of objects. As such, these technologies provide a concrete setting in which to explore the system-level challenges unique to pervasive computing. This research lays the foundations for novel system-level technologies and design methodologies for next generation pervasive computing applications. It includes three key thrusts. First, it addresses the organization and management of novel RFID-based distributed memory subsystems. The key idea is that these might be used as a public asset, shared by multiple applications, leveraging a collective of anonymous mobile smart objects to gather and efficiently disseminate in situcontextual information. The second thrust focuses on maintaining data integrity and consistency across such RFID-based distributed memory subsystems. The last thrust investigates how to generate and store context for novel pervasive computing applications, involving a formal study of the characteristics and scaling properties of different policies to generate and capture distributed space-time contextual data.