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Supporting Service Discovery, Querying and Interaction in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

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Abstract

In this paper, we contend that ubiquitous computing environments will be highly heterogeneous, service rich domains. Moreover, future applications will consequently be required to interact with multiple, specialised service location and interaction protocols simultaneously. We argue that existing service discovery techniques do not provide sufficient support to address the challenges of building applications targeted to these emerging environments.

This paper makes a number of contributions. Firstly, using a set of short ubiquitous computing scenarios we identify several key limitations of existing service discovery approaches that reduce their ability to support ubiquitous computing applications. Secondly, we present a detailed analysis of requirements for providing effective support in this domain. Thirdly, we provide the design of a simple extensible meta-service discovery architecture that uses database techniques to unify service discovery protocols and addresses several of our key requirements. Lastly, we examine the lessons learnt through the development of a prototype implementation of our architecture.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computing Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YR, UK

    Adrian Friday, Nigel Davies, Nat Wallbank & Elaine Catterall

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85721, USA

    Nigel Davies & Stephen Pink

Authors
  1. Adrian Friday
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  2. Nigel Davies
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  3. Nat Wallbank
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  4. Elaine Catterall
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  5. Stephen Pink
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Friday, A., Davies, N., Wallbank, N. et al. Supporting Service Discovery, Querying and Interaction in Ubiquitous Computing Environments. Wireless Networks 10, 631–641 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:WINE.0000044024.54833.cb

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