Pervasive Network Communications: Towards a Human-centric Communications and Computing World

Pervasive computing (a.k.a. human-centric computing) is emerging as the next-generation computing. Today’s distributed and mobile computing’s goal of anytime, anywhere connectivity will be extended to the pervasive network computing’s goal of all the time, everywhere connectivity. It envisions computing environments focusing on humans rather than machines. Highlights include: key concepts and fundamentals of pervasive software for human-centric computing and its multi-disciplinary nature; application of the theoretical concepts to real-world situations to develop pervasive software solutions; examples in a variety of application domains; and technical and non-technical challenges, issues, standards, and state-of-the-art software technologies. This book is suitable for self-study by software and IT professionals, particularly software engineering practitioners and researchers, software architects and designer, interface designers and evaluators, and IT application engineers and managers who are interested in keeping abreast of changes in software technology and computing paradigm. The book can also be used as a text book and as a resource guide for the evolving field of pervasive network computing. In addition, it is suitable for short course series.