Software design issues for ubiquitous computing

The defining characteristic of ubiquitous computing is the attempt to break away from the traditional desktop computing paradigm and move computational power into the environment that surrounds the user. Increasing miniaturization brought on by advances in areas such as VLSI design means that we will soon be able to instrument our environments in order to realize the dream of ubiquitous computing. The promise of ubiquitous computing, however, is that the increased pervasiveness of computation will lead to less intrusive and more valuable services to the end user. For this dream to be realized we need to accompany hardware advances with advances in software technology. In this paper, the author discusses some software challenges for ubiquitous computing.