Balancing transparency, efficiency and security in pervasive systems

TL;DR

This paper surveys pervasive computing, focusing on how transparency constraints impact resource management and security, and explores solutions balancing invasiveness, efficiency, and reliability for ubiquitous systems.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of current challenges and solutions in resource management and security within pervasive computing, emphasizing minimal invasiveness.

Findings

Tradeoffs between transparency and security are critical.

Current solutions aim to balance invasiveness with resource efficiency.

Pervasive computing applications require tailored security approaches.

Abstract

This chapter will survey pervasive computing with a look at how its constraint for transparency affects issues of resource management and security. The goal of pervasive computing is to render computing transparent, such that computing resources are ubiquitously offered to the user and services are proactively performed for a user without his or her intervention. The task of integrating computing infrastructure into everyday life without making it excessively invasive brings about tradeoffs between flexibility and robustness, efficiency and effectiveness, as well as autonomy and reliability. As the feasibility of ubiquitous computing and its real potential for mass applications are still a matter of controversy, this chapter will look into the underlying issues of resource management and authentication to discover how these can be handled in a least invasive fashion. The discussion will be closed by an overview of the solutions proposed by current pervasive computing efforts, both in the area of generic platforms and for dedicated applications such as pervasive education and healthcare.