Traditional Systems Can Work Well for Pervasive Applications. A Case Study: Plan 9 from Bell Labs Becomes Ubiquitous

There is a huge effort in ongoing research on new middleware platforms and new distributed services to support ubiquitous environments and pervasive applications. Prototypes for smart spaces are sometimes used to demonstrate the need for a new particular service, piece of software, or middleware layer. However, we have found that we could easily build a smart space and some applications for it by relying on services already provided by the system we use daily, Plan 9 from Bell Labs. This paper explores how far can we go with a traditional system to support a ubiquitous environment, without using any middleware. We describe how to build a pervasive computing platform using Plan 9, and how we built a smart space to demonstrate this