  This chapter will survey pervasive computing with a look at how its
constraint for transparency affects issues of resource management and security.
The goal of pervasive computing is to render computing transparent, such that
computing resources are ubiquitously offered to the user and services are
proactively performed for a user without his or her intervention. The task of
integrating computing infrastructure into everyday life without making it
excessively invasive brings about tradeoffs between flexibility and robustness,
efficiency and effectiveness, as well as autonomy and reliability. As the
feasibility of ubiquitous computing and its real potential for mass
applications are still a matter of controversy, this chapter will look into the
underlying issues of resource management and authentication to discover how
these can be handled in a least invasive fashion. The discussion will be closed
by an overview of the solutions proposed by current pervasive computing
efforts, both in the area of generic platforms and for dedicated applications
such as pervasive education and healthcare.
