Computing in pervasive cyberspace

Abstract

Freed from the temporal constraints of hardware, software could be the ultimate cyberorganism---a mind taking a body as needed to fulfill a particular function or mission.

Spatial Coordination of Pervasive Services through Chemical-Inspired Tuple Spaces

“…In general, it is predictable that the services that best tackle one ore more marketing targets will survive, while most of the others will end up extinguishing without unnecessarily overloading the system, and with no human intervention. This "ecological" behaviour is typical of today socially situated domains like social networks, and will be likely to play a key role in future pervasive computing systems [Agha 2008;Ulieru and Grobbelaar 2007;Zambonelli and Viroli 2008]. …”

“…trophic interactions in ecological niches [Agha 2008]). Such a natural metaphor can be pushed further than the simple behavioural similarity, to act as the ground upon which identifying a coordination model supporting the requirements of situatedness, adaptivity, and accommodation of diversity-which are inherent properties of natural ecosystems.…”

“…We believe our framework integrates and improves these works in three main directions: (i) it abstracts from the specific internal characteristics of components (no matter whether they are simple reactive components or complex goal-oriented ones) and rather proposes an approach that seamlessly applies to both cases; (ii) it tries to identify an interaction model that is able to represent and subsume the diverse nature-inspired mechanisms under a unifying self-adaptive abstraction (i.e. the semantics chemical reactions); (iii) the ecological approach we undertake goes beyond most of the current studies that limit to ensembles of homogeneous components, defining a suitable framework for supporting the vision of novel pervasive and Internet scenarios as made up of self-adaptive devices and services, that autonomously cooperate for the creation of global services-a sort of cyberorganisms as envisioned in [Agha 2008]. …”

“…According to some recent visions of service systems [Barros and Dumas 2006;Ulieru and Grobbelaar 2007;Agha 2008;Zambonelli and Viroli 2008], we find it useful to see pervasive services (software functionality, pervasive devices, users' preferences, data, knowledge, and signals) as species in a "ecology", defining what we call a pervasive service ecosystem. Such pervasive services get injected in some location of the network and possibly evolve/diffuse around, interacting with one another in a context-dependent way, and then being possible active in a region of the whole network space.…”

Simulation experiences with an ecological approach for pervasive service systems

“…Although one can think at different classes of natural systems and from different perspectives (e.g., physical [19], chemical [25], biological [3], or social/ecological [1]) one can always recognize the following characteristics: above a spatial environmental substrate, autonomous individuals (i.e., agents) of different kinds interact, compete, and combine with each other in respect of the basic laws of nature. Accordingly, in our scenario, the shared pervasive infrastructure substrate will have to be conceived as the space in which bringing to life an ecosystem of service agents, intended as individuals whose computational activities are subject to some basic laws of the ecosystem, and for which the dynamics of the ecosystem (as determined by the enactment of its laws) will provide for naturally enforcing features of self-organization, self-management, and evolvability.…”