A Homogeneous Service Framework for Pervasive Computing Environments

This paper introduces a model addressing the heterogeneity problem of Pervasive Computing systems from a resource, service and context management viewpoint. The presented system architecture, called UBIDEV is a collection of abstraction services for semantic-driven management of the physical environment that provide a design methodology that allow a description of the behavior of the whole system in terms of coordinated homogeneous services. Most of the existing approaches try to hide heterogeneity using a single uniform abstraction layer like the Java VM; these models do not fit the requirements of pervasive computing systems where the dynamism and the heterogeneity if the environment need to be taken into account even at the design level. The presented model faces heterogeneity of pervasive computing systems allowing applications to be described in terms of services provided rather than their low level instantiation details. The main contribution of UBIDEV is in the holistic approach in the management of the environment from the resources, services and context viewpoint. The resulting coordination model allows applications to be described in terms of their functionality while maintaining the degree of dependence they have with the physical environment. At the application level, the provided abstractions allow to build applications that were previously seen as difficult to build: context-awareness that scale along several dimensions, resource and service management that copes with heterogeneity using an agreed semantic, holistic coordination of resources in a service-oriented abstraction model. An example application scenario is then described to underline the approach and the added value of such architecture in terms of system design and resource and service management.