Introduction

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 middleware infrastructures differ from the ones for pervasive computing. In a pervasive computing environment, issues such as mobility, disconnection, and dynamic introduction and removal of devices, and merging of the physical environment with the computational infrastructure are common and affect the underlying middleware infrastructure. Furthermore, different devices might be connected to different networks, with different latency and bandwidth. As a result, the middleware must provide mechanisms for handling disconnections, addressing fault tolerance, and adapting to a number of issues related to diversity including heterogeneous device resources. 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 require autonomous middleware services capable of evolving and self-healing.

This workshop addresses the issues related to the design and implementation of middleware services for pervasive computing. The workshop focuses on the challenges associated with pervasive computing and identifies common paradigms and design decisions that affect most middleware designers.

Since its first installment in 2004, PerWare has successfully gathered the principal practitioners and their experiences under one roof to discuss their findings and move the state of the art forward. We look forward to continue this tradition in PerWare 2008 in Hong Kong.

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Call for Papers
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The design of middleware services to support pervasive computing is extremely challenging, posing new requirements for ease of deployment, handling of heterogeneity and scale, resilience to failure, application support and creation, and incremental deployment and evolution. Facing these challenges is a community-wide effort, necessitating the pooling of our resources and experiences in order to develop new paradigms and techniques. The goal of this workshop is to foster the research community working in this field. The workshop aims to gather the principal practitioners and their experiences under one roof to discuss their findings and move the state of the art forward. The workshop solicits papers addressing the following topics:

1. Middleware design patterns for pervasive computing.
2. Middleware support for novel pervasive computing application models.
3. Middleware support for user-centric computing.
4. Middleware platforms for mobile devices.
5. Adaptable, recoverable, secure and fault tolerant middleware for pervasive computing.
6. Metrics for evaluating pervasive computing middleware infrastructures.

In order to ensure a high-quality technical session, submissions must cover one of the topics above, and should not exceed five pages. Furthermore, we will prioritize experience papers describing lessons learnt from built systems, including information about approaches that did and did not work, unexpected results, common abstractions, implementation of real-world scenarios, and metrics for evaluating pervasive computing middleware infrastructures.

Submissions of papers are solicited in the IEEE proceedings format . Research papers must be original prior unpublished work and not under review elsewhere. All submissions will be peer-reviewed and selected based on their originality, merit, and relevance to the workshop.

Paper submissions will be handled online.

Accepted papers must be presented at the workshop, and will appear in the IEEE PerCom Workshop Proceedings. If you have any questions, please email us at perware at gmail dot com.

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Important Dates

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Organizers

• Jalal Al-Muhtadi, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia.

• Roy Campbell, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.

• Anand Ranganathan, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, USA.

• Gregor Schiele, University of Mannheim, Germany.

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Program Committee

• Cristina Abad, ESPOL, Ecuador.

• Marcus Handte, University of Stuttgart, Germany.

• Raquel Hill, Indiana University, USA.

• Gerd Kortuem, University of Lancaster, UK.

• Rodger Lea, University of British Columbia, Canada.

• Alan Messer, Samsung.

• Soraya Kouadri Mostefaoui, Open University, UK.

• Umar Saif, LUMS, Pakistan.

• Kenichi Yamazaki, NTT DoCoMo, Japan.

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