pREST: a REST-based protocol for pervasive systems

Arxiv preprint arXiv:1108.2389, 2011

We present new system architecture, a distributed framework designed to support pervasive computing applications. We propose a new architecture consisting of a search engine and peripheral clients that addresses issues in scalability, data sharing, data transformation and inherent platform heterogeneity. Key features of our application are a type-aware data transport that is capable of extract data, and present data through handheld devices (PDA (personal digital assistant), mobiles, etc). Pervasive computing uses web technology, portable devices, wireless communications and nomadic or ubiquitous computing systems. The web and the simple standard HTTP protocol that it is based on, facilitate this kind of ubiquitous access. This can be implemented on a variety of devices -PDAs, laptops, information appliances such as digital cameras and printers. Mobile users get transparent access to resources outside their current environment. We discuss our system's architecture and its implementation. Through experimental study, we show reasonable performance and adaptation for our system's implementation for the mobile devices.

2004

Pervasive Computing refers to a seamless and invisible computing environment which provides dynamic, proactive and context-aware services to the user by acquiring context knowledge from the environment and composing available services. In this paper, we demonstrate how heterogeneous Web services can be made interoperable and used to support Pervasive Computing. We present an architecture how a service flow can be automatically composed using syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge. Thus, this paper addresses three problems: (1) How do heterogeneous Pervasive Computing services interoperate in a Pervasive Computing service flow, composed by using syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge; (2) How do we define, distinguish between, and justify the need for these three different kinds of knowledge to be used in service descriptions; and (3) How can we perform ontology integration to enable the automatic composition of Web services into a service flow. A Pervasive Computing prototype system, based on this architecture, has been implemented as a proof-of-concept.

International Journal of Advanced Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, 2014

Pervasive environments are characterized by a large number of embedded devices offering their services to the user. Which of the available services are of most interest to the user considerably depends on the user's current context. Spontaneous service discovery and selection is one of the most important fields of research in pervasive computing. In this paper the authors will present an enhancement of ubiquitous computing discovery mechanisms adding context handling capabilities to Web Services for Devices in Pervasive Computing using UPnP as an infrastructure to address these implicit requests. User preferences, network and location are described by a formal context model ontology that is based on two levels: a generic level and a domain specific level. As compared with previous research, the authors' method uses location aware, UPnP infrastructure, web service for devices and the notion of proactivity in pervasive computing to continuously present the Spontaneous most relevant services to the user or device in response to changes of context, services or user preferences.

Pervasive and Mobile Computing, 2008

Sensors, 2012

The Request-Response (RR) paradigm is widely used in ubiquitous systems to exchange information in a secure, reliable and timely manner. Nonetheless, there is also an emerging need for adopting the Publish-Subscribe (PubSub) paradigm in this kind of systems, due to the advantages that this paradigm offers in supporting mobility by means of asynchronous, non-blocking and one-to-many message distribution semantics for event notification. This paper analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of both the RR and PubSub paradigms to support communications in ubiquitous systems and proposes an abstract communication model in order to enable their seamless integration. Thus, developers will be focused on communication semantics and the required quality properties, rather than be concerned about specific communication mechanisms. The aim is to provide developers with abstractions intended to decrease the complexity of integrating different communication paradigms commonly needed in ubiquitous systems. The proposal has been applied to implement a middleware and a real home automation system to show its applicability and benefits.

Proceedings of the 1st …, 2006

The widespread deployment of inexpensive communications technology, computational resources in the networking infrastructure, and network-enabled end devices poses an interesting problem for end users: how to locate and interact with a particular network service or device. The increasing presence of mobile and ubiquitous applications has created a need for distributed systems and applications that are dynamic and can efficiently adapt to changes in service availability, user requirements and protocols. This paper describes the development of pervasive applications based on a middleware proposal which extracts the functional description of available services in heterogeneous networks exposing it in a unified syntax, and offering them using some standardized protocols.

2012

The Request-Response (RR) paradigm is widely used in ubiquitous systems to exchange information in a secure, reliable and timely manner. Nonetheless, there is also an emerging need for adopting the Publish-Subscribe (PubSub) paradigm in this kind of systems, due to the advantages that this paradigm offers in supporting mobility by means of asynchronous, non-blocking and one-to-many message distribution semantics for event notification. This paper analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of both the RR and PubSub paradigms to support communications in ubiquitous systems and proposes an abstract communication model in order to enable their seamless integration. Thus, developers will be focused on communication semantics and the required quality properties, rather than be concerned about specific communication mechanisms. The aim is to provide developers with abstractions intended to decrease the complexity of integrating different communication paradigms commonly needed in ubiquitous systems. The proposal has been applied to implement a middleware and a real home automation system to show its applicability and benefits.

Data-Centric Systems and Applications, 2015

The adjective pervasive comes from the Latin verb pervadere, which literally means to go through. However, looking at modern dictionaries, we find wider definitions such as to permeate [5] or to diffuse in order to modify and characterize the atmosphere or the physiognomy of a certain ambient [3]. The last definition well characterizes modern pervasive information systems, which had a remarkable growth in recent years. Indeed, as shown in Fig. 1, we can find applications of pervasive systems in the most disparate domains, such as health care, archaeology, museums, pollution control, and others: domains which only a few years ago used computers only for administrative purposes and were alien to involve computers directly in their functionality. On the other hand, pervasive systems rest on, and integrate, many different technologies as far as sensing devices, transmission modalities, and networking techniques are concerned. Back in 1991, Mark Weiser [6] set the essence of modern pervasive systems, stating that they must allow the computer to vanish in the background in the same way as happened with other facilities such as the electric grid or the telephone switching network: as a matter of fact, a typical car has more than a dozen computers and electric motors, but almost no driver is aware of that. This has a fundamental psychological effect, since only when we do not have to concentrate on the individual features of such utilities any more, and they become part of the infrastructure, is our mind free to focus on our goals. The creation of intelligent pervasive spaces is one of the most interesting opportunities offered by pervasive systems: social and physical ambients can be created with the aid of information and communications technologies (ICT), providing enhanced capabilities for humans to interact with the surrounding environment [4]. These features are useful at home-for instance, for providing services for security, energy management, and water and pollution control or to create assistedliving ambients for impaired or elderly people-but also as proactive and intelligent supports to visiting museums and historical sites.

… Computing.[Online]. …, 2001

In an age where wirelessly networked appliances and devices are becoming commonplace, there is a necessity for providing a standard interface to them that is easily accessible by any mobile user. The design outlined in this paper provides an infrastructure and communication protocol for presenting services to heterogeneous mobile clients in a physical space via some short range wireless links. This system uses a Communication Manager to communicate with the client devices. The Communication Manager can be modified easily to work with any type of communication medium, including TCP/IP, Infrared, CDPD and Bluetooth. All the components in our model use a language based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) giving it a uniform and easily adaptable interface. We explain our trade-offs in implementation and through experiments we show that the design is feasible and that it indeed provides a flexible structure for providing services. Centaurus defines a uniform infrastructure for heterogeneous services, both hardware and software , to be made available to diverse mobile users within a confined space.

2002

Many predict that the computing environment of the future will be characterized by the presence of numerous invisible sensors and computing elements, autonomously interacting with each other to dynamically construct and provide services to users that enter and leave the environment. The software challenges to turn such pervasive or ubiquitous computing environments into reality are enormous, to say nothing of the hardware and social challenges. These challenges question many of the assumptions we are used to making and many of the solutions we are used to applying in our current software systems. In this talk, I will review some of the work of my group in the areas of software components, security and access control, and device independent Web access and then analyze where our solutions are lacking and must be adapted fo r pervasive computing.