Peer-2-Peer and Mobile Computing Models ❯ Mobile Service Discovery and Delivery

Overview

Service discovery and delivery problems have recently been drawing much attention from researchers and practitioners. SLP, Jini, and UPnP are among the few emerging service discovery protocols. Although they seem to provide a good solution to the problem, they do not address the need of more sophisticated location and context-aware service selection, and mobile device support. In this project, we develop a multi-tiered mobile service discovery architecture that addresses the dynamics and the added requirements of mobility. Our service discovery system, consisting of proximity, domain, and global service discovery sub-systems, has been designed to be able to deal with selection criteria and requirements different across the sub-systems.

Context-aware, Ubiquitous Service Discovery and Delivery for Mobile Clients

We introduce the concept of context attribute as an effective, flexible means to exploit relevant context information during the service discovery process. The context attributes can express various pieces of information related to client, service, and network conditions. Since it provides a flexible framework for any service-specific selection logic, the context attribute achieves both the specialty of server selection mechanisms and the generality of service discovery protocols. The context attribute and the 3-tier architecture concepts are perfectly incorporated into our service discovery framework to enable dynamic service discovery in the future world of ubiquitous computing. Service delivery takes place following the service discovery phase to complete the dynamic service acquisition process. Since a discovered service may not fit into resource-poor client devices, the service delivery should be handled as a continuum of the precedent service discovery. The two phases can be bridged by client device capability context information. Our unique approach to this problem is a thin-client adaptor to deliver a heavy-weight service to resource-constrained devices.

Objective

The overall self describing sensor network approach is based on the need to provide a scalable, plug and play, smart sensor network that is more flexible and maintainable. The approach leverages both mature and new technologies and standards to develop the system architecture composed of the sensor platform architecture, sensor network hierarchy, and associated software framework. The main approach consists of empowering the sensor network by using surrogate code located on the sensor node to allow interpretation of the data and sensor node control. Our sensor network hardware platform includes RF communications, EEPROM for data storage, EEPROM for surrogate storage, and microprocessor for communication and data manipulation.

People

Dr. Sumi Helal
Choonhwa Lee

Publications

• C. Lee, A. Helal and D. Nordstedt, "μJini Proxy Architecture for Impromptu Mobile Service Access," Submitted to the Workshop on Next Generation Service Platforms for Future Mobile Systems (SPMS 2006) . In conjunction with the IEEE/IPSJ International Symposium on Applications and the Internet (SAINT), Phoenix, Arizona, January 2006. (pdf)

• C. Lee and A. Helal, "A Multi-tier Ubiquitous Service Discovery Protocol for Mobile Clients," Submitted, to the First ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems and Applications (Mobisys), October 2002 (pdf)

• C. Lee and A. Helal, "Context Attributes: An Approach to Enable Context-awareness for Service Discovery," Proceedings of the Third IEEE/IPSJ Symposium on Applications and the Intrnet, Orlando, Florida, January 2003 (pdf).