CAREER: Pervasive Programming with Event Correlation

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

While the advent of mobile and tiny computing devices furthers the pervasion of our society's digital backbone, adequate programming support addressing the needs of adaptivity, versatility, autonomy, and reactivity of pervasive applications is still lacking. We advocate for event correlation as core interaction paradigm embracing the asynchronous and decoupled nature of pervasive systems. Applications define events, which are triggered by sources and multicast to sinks; sinks are characterized by their interests in combinations of events involving criteria on type, value, time, and --- typical of many applications in pervasive systems --- location. Our contributions are threefold. First, we propose a model which generalizes previous approaches and unifies one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many interaction. Second, we devise programming language support for this model, both through specific extensions to mainstream programming languages, as well as through general-purpose programming language constructs conceived to support also alternative inter-process interaction models. Third, we propose novel location-based routing algorithms and protocols devised for overlay networks tailored to event correlation, making use of randomization, compression, hashing, and error coding techniques to tame complexity while achieving secure, reliable and efficient event dissemination. This research will advance the state of the art in event-based programming support by combining expertise in areas considered largely independently so far, such as computer networks and programming languages. The resulting cross-fertilization will furthermore facilitate the education of tomorrow's designers and developers of pervasive systems.