Today we are witnessing the commencement of a new information era, the Internet of Things, a planetary web, which interconnects not only data and people, but also quiescent, assorted objects, distributed over large areas. By activating the universe of things surrounding us, we are heading towards Mark Weiser's envisioned world, where computers vanish into the background, fitting smoothly into the user environment and gracefully providing information and services to users, rather than forcing them to adapt to the intricate ambiance from the computing realm. Users are to be insulated from the technological details, up to the point where they can focus solely on their established goals.
In the context of such pervasive environments, data-centric pervasive applications are developed. The latter must tackle challenges like homogeneously managing heterogeneous data sources and functionalities and are difficult to implement in today's approaches, using Data Stream Management Systems (DSMSs) or ad hoc programming. Pervasive Environment Management Systems (PEMSs) are created in order to ease the development of data-centric pervasive applications over pervasive environments.
We introduce P-Bench, a benchmark designed to assess the easiness of data-centric pervasive application development. We comparatively evaluate three types of systems in P-Bench: a commercially available DSMS, ad hoc programming and a PEMS. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind. According to the results we obtained, developing, deploying and updating pervasive applications is considerably easier when using a PEMS.
