Pervasive Computing: Paradigm for New Era Computing

The technological advances over the last few years have revolutionized the world of personal computing. Today, handheld devices exist that can function as a cellular phone, video camera and PDA, all are contained in one box. Moreover, wireless service providers have started offering numerous data services over their networks. With all these diverse technologies coming together, requirement of anywhere, anytime data access on any device had aroused, which has taken shape to pervasive computing. In this paper, we have discussed about pervasive computing: its vision as proposed by Mark Weiser, its related fields, conceptual model, research challenges which must be met in order to convert this vision into reality, sketching few examples of pervasive computing applications, and finally this paper closes with the research efforts that have been done in this field.