Supporting service discovery, querying and interaction in ubiquitous computing environments

ABSTRACT

Future computing environments will consist of a wide range of network based appliances, applications and services interconnected using both wired and wireless networks. In order to encourage the development of applications in such environments and remove the need for complex administration and configuration tasks, researchers have recently developed a range of service discovery and interaction platforms. Examples of such platforms include SLP, HAVi, UPnP and Jini. While these platforms share a number of common attributes, they each have distinguishing features and hence future networked environments are likely to present developers with a heterogeneous environment composed of multiple specialised support platforms. However, careful analysis of these platforms reveals shortcomings that we believe will inhibit the development of applications that exploit service rich environments. In this paper we discuss these shortcomings and propose a new unifying architecture that brings together the advantages of current service discovery and interaction technologies and provides a new API that we consider to be better suited to the development of service based applications. This work is specifically targeted towards mobile environments, where applications will be required to interact with a wide range of services and devices with minimal user intervention.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

General Terms:
Design, Documentation

Keywords:
Mobile and ubiquitous computing, middleware, service discovery, service interaction