Application Hosting for Pervasive Computing

The world of pervasive computing services is dynamic. User devices, previously thought of as fairly uniformly configured desktop PCs, are being supplemented with a wide range of alternative devices: from mobile phones, PDAs, screen phones, car navigation systems, set-top boxes and self-service kiosks, to function-built devices such as television sets, video recorders, or the infamous "Internet fridge". These devices differ in their capabilities to process input and output data; they differ in the content formats and in the way content is delivered to the end user. Most significantly, they also differ in the interaction patterns they are capabable of supporting with the end user.
Service provisioning is the art of hosting content for those end-user devices; in this paper we review the changes that we expect the advent of pervasive computing technology to bring to conventional service provisioning infrastructure, and present our research prototype of a content provisioning server for the world of pervasive computing. We conclude this paper with a summary of the history of and experiences gained with the first commercial deployment of our server infrastructure -- Swissair's "EasyCheckIn" service.