Spatial Coordination of Pervasive Systems through Chemical-inspired Tuple Spaces

Abstract—Pervasive computing calls for developing distributed infrastructures featuring large-scale distribution, opennes, context-awareness, self-organisation and self-adaptation. There, it is quite natural to see services (software functionality, data, knowledge, signals) as spatial concepts: they are naturally dif-fused in the network, and in each location they are sensitive to the context and compete with each other—as such, they can be active in one or multiple regions (niches) of the network. To support and engineer this scenario, we propose a nature-inspired coordination model of chemical-inspired tuple spaces. They extend standard tuple spaces with the ability of evolving the “weight ” of a tuple just as it represented the concentration of a chemical substance in a biochemical system, namely, in terms of reaction and diffusion rules that adaptively apply to tuples modulo semantic match. We show that this model can be used to enact self- * properties in pervasive systems, through typical spatial patterns involving computational fields, paths, and segregation. I