The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves
into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.
— Mark Weiser in “The Computer for the 21st Century”, 1991.
As a successor to its predecessors, pervasive computing builds on the knowledge found in the fields of distributed computing and mobile computing. The results obtained in research in these areas are the very foundation for the emergence of pervasive computing. Though serving as a solid base, to realize the vision of pervasive computing set forth by Mark Weiser in 1991, we still need to address a heap of challenges.
Several researchers have tried to identify the content of the heap, taking both top down approaches and bottom up approaches. One of the contributions, giving the best overview of the area of challenges, was created by M. Satyanarayanan. The taxonomy shows the research problems in pervasive computing and relates them to the problems found in the areas of distributed and mobile computing. New areas of research are encountered while moving from one area to the other, moreover, the solutions to many of the previously encountered problems become more complex. M. Satyanarayanan suggests that the complexity of creating a well-behaved, robust, scalable system is multiplicative rather than additive when moving from one main area to the next. As a consequence researchers will have to revisit already throughout researched areas, due to the changes in the nature, and thereby the assumptions researchers can make, about the area. An example of this is the remote communication problem, where one solution is the RPC paradigm, which is applicable in distributed computing, somewhat problematic to employ in mobile computing, and mostly unusable in the pervasive computing area.