Autonomous Pervasive Systems and the Policy Challenges of a Small World!

Pervasive systems are the subject of intensifying research efforts and their applications range from health monitoring and intelligent homes, to location aware services, unmanned vehicles and city-wide pervasive infrastructures. Although application- specific solutions have been proposed, their design has often raised additional challenges. This paper discusses the use of autonomous pervasive systems as a fertile testbed for policy-based adaptation and for integrating techniques that span across conventional subject boundaries. Additionally, we present the self-managed cell architectural pattern for realizing policy-driven autonomous pervasive systems and discuss the design of the Ponder2 policy service.