System support for pervasive applications

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2002Pervasive computing provides an attractive vision for the future of computing. Computational power will be available everywhere. Mobile and stationary devices will dynamically connect and coordinate to seamlessly help people in accomplishing their tasks. For this vision to become a reality, developers must build applications that constantly adapt to a highly dynamic computing environment. However, existing distributed systems technologies are ill-suited for building adaptable applications. To make the developers' task feasible, we introduce a system architecture for pervasive computing, called one.world. Our architecture provides an integrated and comprehensive framework for building pervasive applications. It includes services, such as service discovery and migration, that help to build applications and directly simplify the task of coping with constant change. We describe the design and implementation of our architecture and reflect on our own and others' experiences with using it