J Robinson

Scooby: middleware for service composition in pervasive computing

In this paper we argue for middleware languages that aid in service composition. We outline where such languages could be useful through the description of our current architecture, and describe what we believe are the key requirements of such a language. We outline the current state of our implementation, and conclude by describing what requirements are placed on service providers by such composition middleware.

Composing software services in the pervasive computing environment: Languages or APIs?

The pervasive computing environment will be composed of heterogeneous services. In this work, we have explored how a domain specific language for service composition can be implemented to capture the common design patterns for service composition, yet still retain a comparable performance to other systems written in mainstream languages such as Java. In particular, we have proposed the use of the method delegation design pattern, the resolution of service bindings through the use of dynamically adjustable characteristics and the late binding of services as key features in simplifying the service composition task. These are realised through the Scooby language, and the approach is compared to the use of APIs to define adaptable services.

The North Laine Shopping Guide: A Case Study in Modelling Trust in Applications

Facilitating navigation through commercial spaces by third party systems is a likely step in pervasive computing. For these applications to fully engage people they must build trust relationships in a natural manner. We hypothesize that the use of an explicit trust model in the design of the application would improve the rate at which trust is generated. To investigate this hypothesis, we have taken as a case study the design of a shopping guide for a local trading association. We have created an explicit trust model and incorporated this into our design. We have evaluated both our model and our application. The results of this confirmed our hypothesis and provided additional insight into how to model trust in the design of applications.

Deploying Pervasive Advertising in a Farmers’ Market

Farmers’ markets are the source of a rich and pleasurable consumption experience. In this chapter, we report on our attempts to support and augment these experiences through the deployment of pervasive advertising. We describe the ethnographic approach we used to delineate the areas of enjoyment and pleasure, how narratives are weaved around and through the stalls and their products, and how trust is formed and maintained between the stallholders and the customers. We show how this understanding can be applied in the design of supporting advertising applications. We then evaluate the applications using the same ethnographic approach, uncovering problems which would not have been visible with other evaluation techniques.

Bringing the Virtual to the Farmers' Market: Designing for Trust in Pervasive Computing Systems

Since pervasive computing applications are mostly designed to enhance existing social situations, such applications should take account of the trust relationships within the situation in their design. In this paper we describe the ethnographic approach we used to explore how trust is formed and maintained within a farmers’ market, and how this understanding can be applied in the design of supporting applications. We then evaluate the applications using the same ethnographic approach, uncovering problems which would not have been visible with other evaluation techniques.

Enabling Exclusive Shared Access to Cloud of Things Resources

Cloud of Things (CoT) is an emerging paradigm that integrates Cloud Computing and Internet of Things (IoT). CoT is constrained by the limited computing capabilities of IoT resources and the costly investment required to deploy IoT infrastructure. Despite the support of existing CoT implementations to various applications, IoT physical resources are still computationally limited and cannot to be shared as other Cloud resources yet. This paper proposes a new approach to improve shared access to IoT resources. The new approach relies on optimising resource trading of IoT resources to enable exclusive access to allocated resources at a given time. A generic architecture is proposed to support the proposed approach along with notations required to commoditise IoT resources. A case study of multiple application uses is presented. Simulations are carried out to evaluate the feasibility of the approach using three optimisation techniques. The evaluation of the proposed approach includes optimising the cost of resource allocation, different QoS metrics and the coverage of IoT resources.