Engineering reconfigurable distributed software systems: Issues arising for pervasive computing

This chapter establishes a common base for discussing reconfigurability in distributed software systems in general and in pervasive systems in particular, by introducing a generic reconfiguration cycle. Following this cycle, we discuss in detail three former efforts on reconfigurable pervasive systems, and draw conclusions about the capacity of existing approaches to deal with open, dynamic, ad hoc environments. We, then, outline our approach towards uncontrolled reconfiguration targeting environments in which no centralized coordination or prior awareness between services being composed is assumed. Our solution supports awareness of service semantics and related service discovery, configuration change detection and state transfer, interface-aware dynamic adaptation of service orchestrations and conversat ion-aware check-pointing and recovery.