Keith Farkas

Guest Editors' Introduction: Building a Sensor-Rich World

Sensor networks have historically been relegated to special applications and research projects. Technological advances are making it possible to move from this domain to one in which sensors are pervasive in our world and new applications abound. This article provides an introduction to this special issue on Building a Sensor-Rich World.

Dealing with Scale and Adaptation of Global Web Services Management

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are becoming the prevalent approach for realizing modern services and systems. SOA offers superior support for autonomy (decoupling) and heterogeneity compared to previous generation middleware systems, resulting in more scalable and adaptive solutions. However, SOA have not adequately addressed management, while traditional management solutions do not sufficiently scale to address the needs of (global) Web services. We propose scalable management based on models and industry standards. We discuss a use case for global service management and present its design, implementation, and preliminary evaluation. We retain all the benefits of SOA while also enabling global scale manageability. Our approach provides manageability that is comprehensible for administrators yet automated enough for integration into autonomous systems.

Guest Editors' Introduction: Virtual Machines

A system virtual machine is a software implementation of a real computer that can execute unmodified applications and an operating system. This issue contains articles and interviews that explore virtual machine use in pervasive computing.

Leendert van Doorn and Jörg Brakensiek on Virtual Machines [Interview]

To better understand virtual-machine use in pervasive computing, IEEE Pervasive Computing interviewed experts Leendert van Doorn and Jörg Brakensiek. Van Doorn is a senior fellow at AMD in charge of the overall virtualization strategy; Brakensiek, a principal member of the research staff at Nokias Research Center, heads a team researching virtualization.