A user-centric vision of service-oriented Pervasive Information Systems

International audienceInformation Systems (IS) have massively adopted service orientation by exposing their functionalities as services. With the evolution of mobile technologies (smartphones, 3G/4G networks, etc.), such systems are now confronted with a new pervasive environment for which they were not originally designed. Indeed, pervasive environments are characterized by their heterogeneity and dynamicity due to their evolving context and their need for transparency. None of these features are particularly considered in traditional IS designed for stable and controlled office environments. In our new vision for service- oriented Pervasive Information Systems (PIS), the user becomes the center of these systems. This paper presents a user-centric service-oriented vision for PIS based on a context-aware intentional approach, which considers the user intention and the context in which this intention arises as a guiding principle for service description, discovery, prediction and recommendation

A Semantic Framework for Priority-based Service Matching in Pervasive Environments

The increasing popularity of personal wireless devices has raised new demands for the efficient discovery of heterogeneous devices and services in pervasive environments. The existing approaches such as Jini [1], UPnP [8], etc., describe services at a syntactic level and the matching mechanisms in these approaches are limited to syntactic comparisons based on attributes or interfaces. In order to overcome the limitations in these approaches, there has been an increased interest in the use of semantic description and matching techniques to support effective service discovery. This paper proposes a semantic matching approach which facilitates the discovery of device-based services in a pervasive environment; the approach provides a ranking facility that orders services according to their suitability and also considers priorities placed on individual requirements in a request during the matching process. The evaluation studies have shown that the matcher results correlate reasonably well with human judgement

A Pragmatic Approach for the Semantic Description and Matching of Pervasive Resources

The increasing popularity of personal wireless devices has raised new demands for the efficient discovery of heterogeneous devices and services in pervasive environments. With the advancement of the electronic world, the diversity of available services is increasing rapidly. %This raises new demands for the efficient discovery and location of heterogeneous services and resources in dynamically changing environments. Traditional approaches for service discovery describe services at a syntactic level and the matching mechanisms available for these approaches are limited to syntactic comparisons based on attributes or interfaces. In order to overcome these limitations, there has been an increased interest in the use of semantic description and matching techniques to support effective service discovery. In this paper, we present a semantic matching approach to facilitate the discovery of device-based services in pervasive environments. The approach includes a ranking mechanism that orders services according to their suitability and also considers priorities placed on individual requirements in a request during the matching process. The solution has been systematically evaluated for its retrieval effectiveness and the results have shown that the matcher results agree reasonably well with human judgement. Another important practical concern is the efficiency and the scalability of the semantic matching solution. Therefore, we have evaluated the scalability of the proposed solution by investigating the variation in matching time in response to increasing numbers of advertisements and increasing request sizes, and have presented the empirical results

Policy-based model-driven engineering of QoS-aware pervasive services for wireless networks

While the Internet has evolved into an essential service delivery mfrastructure, the future success of mobile wireless networks also largely relies on their ability to provide customisable and self-adaptable services (named as pervasive services) in a cost-effective manner. The traditional static service engineering approach has become inadequate due to their problems related to adaptability, scalability and quality-of-service. This Thesis proposes to tackle these problems from the internal logic of pervasive services themselves by employing a combination of policies and models. This Thesis investigates how a pervasive service itself is represented as a policy-based management (PBM) system and how its creation is (semi-)automated by models of OMG Model-driven Architecture (MDA). A novel integration of PBM and MDA for the benefit of pervasive service engineering is proposed and validated. The output of the above creation is an executable sketch of a pervasive service with a generic policy decision engine reasoning over policies as its core. Service (re-)composition, together with loosely coupled policies for service description, provides a flexible and comprehensive mechanism to achieve context-awareness. The constituent components of a composed service can be discovered on the fly, using two complementary ad hoc service discovery algorithms based on the pull method and the push method respectively. The service discovery in this Thesis reuses the MDA models that are generated during static service creation stage and makes them available to the dynamic stages of the service lifecycle such as service discovery and service re-composition. Another contribution of this Thesis is the investigation of a comprehensive Quality of Pervasive Service (QoPS) model that integrates the QoS parameters perceived by end users and network QoS parameters. This QoPS model has been utilized for service component selection. The system is evaluated and validated both analytically and experimentally illustrating the methodology's feasibility, the system's performance effectiveness and efficiency

Semantic-Based Context-Aware Service Discovery in Pervasive-Computing Environments

Recent technological advancements are enabling the vision of pervasive or ubiquitous computing to become a reality. Service discovery is vital in such a computing paradigm, where a great number of devices and software components collaborate unobtrusively and provide numerous services. Current service-discovery protocols do not make use of contextual information in discovering services, and as a result, fail to provide the most appropriate and relevant services for users. In addition, current protocols rely on keyword-based search techniques and do not consider the semantic description of services. Thus, they suffer from poor precision and recall. To address the need for a discovery architecture that supports the envisioned scenarios of pervasive computing, we propose a context-aware service-discovery protocol that exploits meaningful contextual information, either static or dynamic, to provide users with the most suitable and relevant services. The architecture relies on a shared, ontology-based, semantic representation of services and context to enhance precision and recall, and to enable knowledge sharing, capability-based search, autonomous reasoning, and semantic matchmaking. Furthermore, the architecture facilitates a dynamic service-selection mechanism to filter and rank matching services, based on their dynamic contextual attributes, which further enhances the discovery process and saves users time and effort. Our empirical results indicate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed architecture

Semantic Deployment of Services in Pervasive Environments

International audiencePervasive devices, such as mobile phones or personal gateways, allows more and more to execute personal services and not only legacy services. This opportunity raises the challenge of deploying heterogeneous services non-previously considered in the environment. In this paper, we present an architecture for the semantic deployment of services in a pervasive environment. This architecture, based on a middleware distributed on each device, specially includes a Deployment Service interacting discovery and interoperability middleware services. This Deployment Service takes into account the semantic description of services and the semantic description of deployment itself to apply a semantically and timely local deployment strategy

Interoperability of Service Discovery Protocols: Transparent versus Explicit Approaches

International audienceDiscovering networked services in pervasive computing environments is problematic as multiple Service Discovery Protocols (SDPs), differing on their services description formats as well as advertisement and request models, have already become (de-facto) standards. This calls for a solution to SDP interoperability, enabling clients to locate networked services independent of the SDP they use to advertise their presence. In this paper, we report on our experience in developing two such solutions: the transparent approach of INDISS based on message translation, and the explicit approach of MSDA based on protocol integration. While efficient and able to support legacy clients and services, INDISS is limited by the basic service information available in existing SDPs, and assumptions about the network protocols used by the SDPs. Advanced discovery features required by pervasive environments, such as context or security management, can only be provided by more complex discovery frameworks like MSDA, but come at a price

Pervasive Device and Service Discovery Protocol in Interoperability XBee-IP Network

The Internet of Things (IoT) communication protocol built over IP and non-IP environment. Therefore, a gateway device will be needed to bridge the IP and non-IP network transparently since an IoT user is more likely to concern on the service provided by the IoT device, rather than the complexity of the network or device configuration. Since today ubiquitous computing needs to hide the architectural level from it users, the data & information centric approach was proposed. However, the data & information centric protocol is having several issues and one of them is device and service discovery protocol over IP & non-IP network. This paper proposed a pervasive device and service discovery protocol that able to work in interoperability of the IP and non-IP network. The system environment consists of a smart device with XBee Communication as the non-IP network that will send the device and service description data to the IP network using WebSocket. The gateway will able to recognize the smart device and sent the data to the web-based user application. The user application displayed the discovered devices along the services and able to send the control data to each of the smart devices. Our proposed protocol also enriched with the smart device inoperability detection by using keep-alive tracking from the gateway to each of the smart devices. The result showed that the delay for the user application to detect the smart device in the XBee network is around 10.13 ms delay, and the service average delay requested by the user application to each of the devices is 2.13 ms

Personalizable Service Discovery in Pervasive Systems

Today, telecom providers are facing changing challenges. To stay ahead in the competition and provide market leading offerings, carriers need to enable a global ecosystem of third party independent application developers to deliver converged services. This is the aim of leveraging a open standardsbased service delivery platform. To identify and to cope with those challenges is the main target of the EU funded project IST DAIDALOS II. And a central point to satisfy the changing user needs is the provision of a well working, user friendly and personalized service discovery. This paper describes our work in the project on a middleware in a framework for pervasive service usage. We have designed an architecture for it, that enables full transparency to the user, grants high compatibility and extendability by a modular and pluggable conception and allows for interoperability with most known service discovery protocols. Our Multi-Protocol Service Discovery and the Four Phases Service Filtering concept enabling personalization should allow for the best possible results in service discovery