Pervasive Computing: All-Pervasive?

I some confused this article as I've found there nothing new. There had been gathered and some compiled the trivial facts. It's trend how are developing control systems for industry at present time. "Clever" sensors make its work, so often very sophisticated one. They can communicate with other sensors if it needed and do not load net traffic while being asked to send something for host request.

Just a commonplace blog entry.

"I some confused this article as I've found there nothing new."

Mayhaps there were blank spaces to fill and someone earns their keep writing such repetitions.

"Mayhaps there were blank spaces to fill and someone earns their keep writing such repetitions."

It would may mayhaps. Though, these guys rather want to win a pole position of new meal-chain. Let's they invite something more original than "smart dust" to buy us.

Kind regards.

I have a lot of respect for the author (Joe Polastre) -- he's a smart guy schooled at the intellectual epicenter of "sensor networks" (Berkeley / Intel labs), so he's been thinking about this for a long time. His arguments for shifting intelligence onto the sensor node strikes me as valid if not entirely surprising. Moore's law makes this easy: where we previously designed a simple RS422 interface into a sensing device, for the same cost we can now design in a microcontroller with 4KBytes of RAM and a USB port (or IEEE 802.15.4 wireless connection, or ...).

The term "Pervasive Computing" suggests a world in which computation and sensing is everywhere in our environment, but what Polastre is working towards is really "Proactive Computing" -- eloquently described by David Tennenhouse in the 2000 ACM paper of the same name. Tennenhouse points out that it's not sufficient to have computation everywhere: it also has to know how to take care of itself without human intervention. This gives rise to "helpful" technology, not just "smart" technology, which is really what we're after in the first place.

- ff

I already adopted this style/ approach years ago in fact my lift/elevators now run on just 4 wires not including hard wired saftey lines( must be hard wire by law) but instead of running endless cables now just down to 4 !!! You would be mad to look at a central unit doing all the nitty gritty, it so much easier to offload so much of the trival tasks to a local proccessor. 4 cables 7 watts in standby !!!

As fearless fool said, Joe is one of the best known experts in wireless sensors networks. The change of approach, from sensor networks to pervasive computing, is a big one. It will allow micro computers to interacts directly with their environment right where they are and not be transmitting every single piece of information back and forth to a central processing unit. This will improve latency and significantly reduce data throughput (and energy consumption). The big question though, is how are we all going to do this; build applications that interact and work with each other and that can be configured easily by any user (not a programmer or WSN expert).

It is important that we start thinking on how. I don't see ZigBee doing this the right way, but I'm not sure there's any one approaching the problem the way it should be approached.

I have not a bit of doubt that author of article at blog entry is not an expert. And I have nothing against promotion targeted articles. It's legal way to attract the attention and investments.

But declared there truthes that sensors should be placed everywhere being clever and software should be easy and safe for not experienced end-user do not look as revolutional. These arguments had been spent PLC, SCADA, etc promoters at their times already.

Regards.