ITR: Efficient Power-Aware Data Access in Pervasive Computing Environments

With the rapid emergence of Internet-based techniques and the

explosive growth of pervasive computing, there will be an exponential increase of customers accessing information through battery powered mobile devices. Data access techniques proposed for wired networks may not be feasible for mobile environments due to the limitations of bandwidth and power. Therefore, it has become necessary to re-evaluate and possibly redesign data access strategies to efficiently utilize bandwidth and power considering the limitations of mobile environments. In single-hop mobile environments, the research will address the issues associated with broadcasting and caching techniques, i.e., the energy consumption issue, the query latency issue, the bandwidth utilization issue, and the scalability issue. The research in multi-hop mobile environments concentrates on designing and evaluating cooperative caching techniques to reduce the bandwidth and power consumption, and to address scalability, cache consistency, and security issues. A testbed will be used to evaluate the proposed data access mechanisms in an integrated manner and evaluate the effects of various techniques on the overall system performance. The research results will have significant impacts on making pervasive computing more affordable to the increasing customer demands and more amenable to commercial, civilian, and military applications.