Mechanisms of self-organization in pervasive computing

The mass deployment of sensors and pervasive computing systems expected in the next few years, will require novel approaches to program and gather information from such systems. Suitable approaches will be general purpose, independent of a specific scenario and sensor deployment, and able to adapt autonomically to different scales and to a number of unforeseen circumstances. This paper focuses on the requirements and issues of upcoming pervasive computing scenario, and surveys current research initiatives to deal with them. In particular researches addressing data retrieval and aggregation, macro-programming, and data integration in pervasive computing infrastructures will be detailed. Overall, the paper illustrates our ideas on collecting information from both sensor systems and Web resources and on linking them together in overlay knowledge network offering applications comprehensive and understandable information about their computational environment.