Autonomic Management of Smart Spaces

Management complexity of Smart Space environments increases with advances in pervasive computing domains. Extensive research work has been carried out to demonstrate the power of pervasive computing across a wide spectrum of domains. This research shows the significance of pervasive computing and it also highlights the complexity issues in the development, deployment and maintenance of such environments. To allow industry to adopt pervasive computing, especially its offspring Smart Spaces, a method of management must be devised. While research is being carried out in this area, a new and exciting area has emerged known as Autonomic Computing. Autonomic Computing has now become an umbrella term for computer environments that display forms of autonomic control over themselves. This paper explores the overlap of Pervasive Computing and Autonomic Computing with particular reference to Smart Spaces. It shows how the self-administrating properties of an autonomic computing solution, using IBM’s Autonomic Toolkit, complements a Smart Space enabled framework such as Open Service Gateway initiative (OSGi). The conclusion reached is that the convergence of Autonomic Computing and Pervasive Computing research areas could provide a more promising future for the management of pervasive environments resulting in a reduction in cost and complexity