PERWARE 2011: 8th IEEE international workshop on middleware and system support for pervasive computing - committees and welcome

Context-awareness, dynamism, and heterogeneity are some of the properties that differentiate pervasive computing from traditional distributed systems. Most traditional distributed systems are unaware of context, are static, and are composed of homogeneous devices. As a result, the assumptions underlying traditional infrastructures differ from the ones for pervasive computing. In a pervasive computing environment, issues such as mobility, disconnection, dynamic introduction and removal of devices, and merging of the physical environment with the computational infrastructure are common and affect the underlying middleware and system-level infrastructure. The scale of pervasive computing in terms of the number of devices and services, combined with the lack of a single system administrator, the associated dynamism, and frequent failures requires middleware and system services capable of evolving and reorganizing themselves.