Both the scale and the reach of computer systems and
embedded devices have been expanding constantly over the
last few decades. As computer systems become pervasive,
their criticality increases because they become an even more
integral part of the infrastructure upon which our society
depends. Hence, pervasive systems are likely to become
“society critical” and their dependable operation must be
ensured.
Since the number of computing nodes in a pervasive sys-
tem will be much greater than in traditional dependable sys-
tems, the operating cost per node needs to become much
lower. Therefore, more cost effective dependability mecha-
nisms need to be deployed to achieve the desired degree of
dependability at a given maximum operating cost.
In this paper, we explain the notion of pervasive depend-
ability and outline some of the challenges we face in achiev-
ing pervasive dependability. We then describe our compo-
nent based data-flow oriented middleware that we use as a
test bed to investigate how to address these challenges.