Abstract :
Quality of Information (QoI or IQ) touches every part of the end-to-end flow of information from its pervasive sources, like sensors and the observation data they produce, to the various fusion layers that process these data and eventually to the applications (and their users) that use them. The effectiveness of actions taken by these applications using this information serves as the ultimate assessor of the quality and value-add provided by the entire sensor-enabled application. Complementing “traditional” provisioning of QoS with QoI for pervasive computing is challenging and difficult due to the resource-constrained, dynamic and distributed nature of the system, the weakness under security attacks, the incomplete understanding of the impact that different characteristics of the sensor-generated data (e.g., freshness, resolution & sampling frequency) have on the applications´ utility, and the lack of a design approach that takes into account the different types of resources and their inter-dependencies. Novel mechanisms are required in pervasive computing which should integrate QoI, network QoS, computational QoS, security, and a user´s Quality of Experience (QoE), which will be influenced by the application goals and the pervasive environment in which the application is utilized.
