Traditional Systems Can Work Well for Pervasive Applications. A Case Study: Plan 9 from Bell Labs Becomes Ubiquitous

There is a huge effort in ongoing research on new middleware platforms and new distributed services to support ubiquitous environments and pervasive applications. Most research projects mention concrete applications or demonstrators used to back up the claimed need for a new particular service, piece of software, or middleware layer. However, we have found that in many cases we could easily build such applications by relying on services already provided by the system we use daily, Plan 9 from Bell Labs. This paper explores how far can we go with a traditional system to support an ubiquitous environment, with no need for new services. We describe how we used Plan 9 to make our environment become ubiquitous. We describe as well what limits we found, and what technology could be used to overcome them.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: PERCOM
• Authors: Francisco J. Ballesteros, Gorka Guardiola Muzquiz, Enrique Soriano, Katia Leal Algara
• Keywords: Most Research Projects, PERCOM 2005, Ubiquitous Environment, Ubiquitous Environments, Wireless Networks