Enabling Ubiquitous Coordination Using Application Sessions

Enabling coordination among ubiquitous computing applications and resources requires programming abstractions and development tools tailored to this unique environment. This paper introduces a suite of coordination abstractions that enables expressive interaction between ubiquitous computing applications and dynamically available resources. In our model, applications express their coordination needs in terms of application sessions that are loosely defined by a set of interactions with remote resources. Our approach allows developers to delegate responsibility for the construction and maintenance of the communication links necessary to support the application’s sessions to an underlying middleware. In this paper, we formalize a suite of session definitions for coordination in general classes of ubiquitous computing applications. We also present a middleware based on this coordination model that directly supports the software development task. Finally, we demonstrate the simplicity and flexibility of our approach using a real-world application.