Combining Theory and Systems Building in Pervasive Computing

Pervasivecomputingarenowadaysinwidespreaduse,deeply penetrating into and increasingly demonstratingits significance in our everyday work and leisurelife. In the last decade, cheap and low energyconsuming devices made far-reaching impact onthe pervasive computing paradigm and fueled upa plethora of new applications. For instance,solar-powered sensors are expansively deployed tomonitor fragile environments [1]; smart telephonyand wireless Internet access enabled personalisedinformation provision [2]; and RFID and otheridentificationtechnologiesenhancedfactoryautomationmaking manufacture easier and more cost-effective [3].Invariouscontexts, PervasiveComputinghasbeenusedinterchangeably with other terms such as “ubiquitouscomputing”, “ambient intelligence”, or the mostrecent and hottest “Internet of Things”. A singledefinition, therefore, is hard to achieve. Instead, afamily of both conventional and emerging disciplineshave been considered underpinning or relevant topervasive computing. These include, but not limitedto, contextual-awareness, mobile computing, wirelesscommunication, human-computer interaction, sensornetwork, distributed artificial intelligence, etc. At theheart of the diverse landscape of enabling technologies,pervasive computing follows one single principle. Thatis Mark Weiser’s vision of smart devices blending anddisappearing into our surroundings so as to provideunobtrusive and continuous support to our everydayactivities [4][5].Indeed, there are so many interesting things tocover in pervasive computing. This special issueof the Computer Journal aims at reporting novelresearch, new developments, and directions for futureinvestigation and applications in some chosen sub-fields. In particular, we selected papers from recentinternational conferences and workshops that havetriggered interesting discussion in the audiences. Wetried to select papers that jointly covered multipleaspects of pervasive computing. For instance, onthe network front, the paper “Ant-based Energy-awareDisjoint Multipath Routing Algorithm for MANETs”by Wu and Song discussed a novel routing algorithm formobile