PCOM - a component system for pervasive computing

Applications in the pervasive computing domain are challenged by the dynamism in which their execution environment changes, e.g. due to user mobility. As a result, applications have to adapt to changes regarding their required resources. In this paper we present PCOM, a component system for pervasive computing. PCOM offers application programmers a high-level programming abstraction which captures the dependencies between components using contracts. The resulting application architecture is a tree formed by components and their dependencies. PCOM supports automatic adaptation in cases where the execution environment changes to the better or to the worse. User supplied as well as system provided strategies take users out of the control loop while offering flexible adaptation control.