Author's personal copy Pervasive and Mobile Computing 5 (2009) 133–134 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Pervasive and Mobile Computing journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pmc Editorial Introduction to the special issue on homeland and global security Larry Holder a,* , Mohan Kumar b , Raffaele Bruno c a Washington State University, USA b University of Texas at Arlington, USA c Institute for Informatics & Telematics, Italy article info Article history: Available online 3 December 2008 The development, deployment and coordination of pervasive and mobile computing has been studied for a number of years, and much of this research is beginning to transition into real solutions for a variety of domains. One domain that is ripe for research and development in this area is homeland and global security. Much of the security mission involves the monitoring of various environments (e.g., ports, borders, mass transit hubs, financial centers, power grids, the Internet) and the prediction and detection of threats to these environments. Pervasive and mobile computing represents a general solution to maintaining security in these environments. Components of such solutions include novel sensor and sensor systems for the detection of various threats, efficient and effective deployment of mobile devices and sensors in such environments, heterogeneous systems for surveillance and threat detection, secure and fault tolerant coordination and communication of sensors in homeland and global security environments, information fusion for prediction and detection of threats, integration and registration of data from multiple sources, and effective decision-making in dynamic environments. Since the nature of the challenge restricts in situ testing of the various approaches, high-fidelity simulation and modeling of such systems is necessary, including the mobile devices and sensors, their communication, the data produced, the characteristics of potential threats, and the temporal interaction in response to the sequence of events leading up to the threat. The advent of pervasive and mobile computing on one hand and the rapid progress in sensor systems and RFID tags on the other have paved the way for the application of three important problems related to global and homeland security: (i) surveillance systems; (ii) military command and control systems; and (iii) crisis prevention, management, and recovery. Static and mobile video cameras, RFIDs, and sensor networks, that provide different media streams (video, audio, signal, textual data and images), together with such techniques as context awareness, information fusion and others are being employed to enhance the view and scope of video surveillance systems [1]. Hostile environments, including crisis management and military situations require adaptive deployment of application services proactively and autonomously. In many such scenarios direct human involvement may pose health and safety problems to the individuals involved. Increasingly, individual robots (including mobile) are deployed to perform such tasks. In modern highly dynamic tactical scenarios, warfighters will not only execute orders from the command center but also make real-time, highly critical collaborative decisions that require timely access to high quality tactical information from diverse sources such as sensors, robots, satellites, and other warfighters in the field [2]. Traditional information systems lead to additional communication and thus incur high energy cost critical to dynamic resource-constrained environments. Given the technological advances, it is imperative to employ advanced techniques to maintain up-to-date consistent information in a distributed fashion on readily accessible and available devices. The users in a military environment typically use heterogeneous mobile devices to access secure information and issue commands anywhere at any time. Sensor systems and associated software tools can be effectively employed to monitor the physical environments, and pervasive and mobile computing devices can be used to deploy appropriate services and manage the situation. Since conventional communication infrastructures can be * Corresponding address: Washington State University, School of EECS, Box 642752, 9164 Pullman, WA, USA. E-mail address: holder@wsu.edu (L. Holder). 1574-1192/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pmcj.2008.12.001