CoMA Workshop Final Report

Abstract

With the miniaturization of computing elements, their in- creasing number, interconnection, and penetration of our daily lives, pervasive computing environments start to be- come more and more complex. This results in an apparent claim for improved coordination mechanisms, to optimize, to enhance effectiveness and eventually to provide the users with a sufficient level of quality. We took this as our mo- tivation to investigate the concept of coordination applied to pervasive environments in more details. This report is the summary of the CoMA workshop held at IEEE WET- ICE 2007 and highlights the current research efforts and outlines potential future challenges with respect to coordi- nation in pervasive environments. 1 Motivation Recent developments and technological advances in in- formation and communication technology (ICT) are lead- ing to an increasing availability and functionality of mobile, portable, and embedded devices, and an improved quality- of-service of wireless connections together with decreasing costs [7]. The Internet and (mobile) telecommunication net- works are currently converging to one vast and ubiquitously available information space. Consequently, a great mag- nitude and diversity of entities involved in such pervasive environments are emerging. We are moving towards the "Internet of Things" [4] and we are shifting from the one person is associated with one computer paradigm to a one- to-numerous relationship. In addition, these trends and technologies shall be exploited to beneficially assist the users' in their daily activities--but as unobtrusively as possible; as it is the ma- jor claim and challenge at the same time of pervasive com- puting [8]. Mark Weiser described this most accurately in his article [10] as "The most profound technologies are those that [...] weave themselves into the fabric of every- day life until they are indistinguishable from it". People and their collaborative behaviors shall be supported by us- ing pervasive computing technology. We argue that an appropriate engineering of pervasive computing environments with an explicit handling of co- ordination mechanisms is inevitable in order to eventually provide the conveniences of ubiquitous services delivered with an acceptable quality. These considerations represent our motivation for the organization and conduction of the workshop about Interdisciplinary Aspects of Coordination Applied to Pervasive Environments: Models and Applica- tions (CoMA)1 held at the 16th IEEE International Work- shops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructures for Col- laborative Enterprises (WETICE)2 from June 18-20, 2007