Investigating - verb :
1 carry out a systematic or formal inquiry into (an incident or allegation) so
as to establish the truth.
2 carry out research into (a subject).
3 make a search or systematic inquiry.
— Oxford English Dictionary.
The design and implementation of dependable pervasive computing architectures implies the investigation of a wide range of aspects. Due to the transient nature of the environment, several of the aspects fall within the aspects that determine the dependability properties of peer-to-peer architectures. Fault tolerance is a major aspect, as the underlying infrastructure is bound to change or fail during the course of time. To enable systems to be reactive or proactive, aspects such as the reflective properties of the architecture have to be considered. Also, the adaptive properties of the architecture must be taken into account, to enable the system to adapt to certain circumstances. The list is long also including aspects as reliability, scalability, security, survivability, safety, maintainability, responsiveness, availability, data integrity, etc.
In the creation of dependable pervasive computing architectures pure centralized or even semi centralized architectures are problematic to employ. One could imagine the use of strategies as a key factor of the system, for instance helping to determine how to control the event flows of the system. Strategies could be based on resource awareness, due to the fact that a diverse range of devices are supposed to collaborate in pervasive computing environments. Other strategies could be based on some sort of contingency management, autonomously handling unforeseen states of the application, the network, the device etc.