Nature-inspired Spatial Metaphors for Pervasive Service Ecosystems

Innovative paradigms and frameworks have to be identified to enable the effective deployment and execution of pervasive computing services. Such frameworks must be conceived so as to match the spatially-situated nature of pervasive services, and must be able to exhibit properties of self-organization and self-adaptability, self-management, and of long-lasting evolvability. This paper discusses how such frameworks should get inspiration from natural systems, by enabling modeling and deployment of services as autonomous individuals, spatially-situated in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices, all of which acting, interacting, and evolving according to a limited set of spatial "eco-laws". In this context, this paper presents a reference architecture to uniformly frame ecosystem concepts, surveys and critically analyzes different nature-inspired spatial metaphors to realize the idea, and details our current research agenda concerning the development of service frameworks inspired to the ecological metaphor.