A User-centric Task Computing Architecture for Pervasive Computing

Recent advances in pervasive computing and service-oriented computing have led to a desire to better support user-oriented tasks. Task computing is a new paradigm that tries to provide computational support for humans in terms of their tasks that the human is involved in, which has become a driving force in realizing the vision of pervasive computing. One of the key challenges of task computing paradigm is how to build the appropriate infrastructure in filling the gap between the tasks and the services. To solve the problem, this paper puts forward a user-centric task computing architecture for heterogeneous and dynamic pervasive computing environments which called U-TCA. The U-TCA focuses on sensing and abstracting user's requirement based task model on the one hand, and using middleware to mask the heterogeneity of computing environment on the other hand. The key technologies of the U-TCA are also discussed in detail, including the techniques of task acquisition, task modeling and task mapping.