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A survey on dependability improvement techniques for pervasive computing systems

普适计算系统的可靠性提高技术综述

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Abstract

The goal of this survey is to summarize the state-of-the-art research results and identify research challenges of developing and deploying dependable pervasive computing systems. We discuss the factors that affect the system dependability and the studies conducted to improve it with respect to these factors. These studies were categorized according to their similarities and differences in hope of shedding some insight into future research. There are three categories: context management, fault detection, and uncertainty handling. These three categories of work address the three most difficult problems of pervasive computing systems. First, pervasive computing systems’ perceived environments, which are also called their contexts, can vary intensively, and thus have a great impact on the systems’ dependability. Second, it is challenging to guarantee the correctness of the systems’ internal computations integrated with interactions with external environments for developers. Fault detection is then an important issue for improving dependability for these systems. Last but not least importantly, pervasive computing systems interact with their environments frequently. These interactions can be affected by many uncertainties, which can jeopardize the systems’ dependability. After a discussion of these pieces of work, we present an outlook for its future research directions.

摘要

创新点

本文分析了开发部署一个可靠的普适计算系统过程中所面临的挑战, 并总结了为应对这些挑战而提出的最先进的研究成果。 通过讨论影响普适计算系统可靠性的因素, 我们将已有提高系统可靠性的技术分为了三类: 上下文管理, 错误检测以及不确定性的处理。 首先, 普适计算系统会感知并利用环境信息(上下文), 而上下文变化剧烈且极可能发生不一致, 因此上下文会对系统可靠性产生较大影响。 其次, 保证系统内部计算及其与外界环境交互的正确性对开发者来说是具有挑战性的, 故错误检测是提高系统可靠性的重要辅助手段。 再者, 普适计算系统与环境的交互过程中存在很大的不确定性, 这些不确定性会危害系统的可靠性。 对这些工作进行详细讨论之后, 我们又对普适计算可靠性提高的未来研究方向做了展望。

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, China

    WenHua Yang & Chang Xu

  2. Department of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, China

    WenHua Yang & Chang Xu

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China

    YePang Liu & S. C. Cheung

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  1. WenHua Yang
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  2. YePang Liu
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  3. Chang Xu
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  4. S. C. Cheung
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Correspondence to Chang Xu or S. C. Cheung.

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Yang, W., Liu, Y., Xu, C. et al. A survey on dependability improvement techniques for pervasive computing systems. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 58, 1–14 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-015-5300-3

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