Yérom-David Bromberg

INDISS: interoperable discovery system for networked services

The emergence of handheld devices associated with wireless technologies has introduced new challenges for middleware. First, mobility is becoming a key characteristic; mobile devices may move around different areas and have to interact with different types of networks and services, and may be exposed to new communication paradigms. Second, the increasing number and diversity of devices, as in particular witnessed in the home environment, lead to the advertisement of supported services according to different service discovery protocols as they come from various manufacturers. Thus, if networked services are advertised with protocols different than those supported by client devices, the latter are unable to discover their environment and are consequently isolated. This paper presents a system based on event-based parsing techniques to provide full service discovery interoperability to any existing middleware. Our system is transparent to applications, which are not aware of the existence of our interoperable system that adapts itself to both its environment across time and its host to offer interoperability anytime anywhere. A prototype implementation of our system is further presented, enabling us to demonstrate that our approach is both lightweight in terms of resource usage and efficient in terms of response time.

The Amigo Service Architecture for the Open Networked Home Environment

The Amigo project aims to develop a networked home system enabling the ambient intelligence / pervasive computing vision by effectively integrating devices and their hosted services in today’s home. The Amigo system architecture poses limited technology-specific restrictions, supporting interoperability among heterogeneous services.

Middleware Architecture for Ambient Intelligence in the Networked Home

With computing and communication capabilities now embedded in most physical objects of the surrounding environment and most users carrying wireless computing devices, the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) / pervasive computing vision [28] pioneered by Mark Weiser [32] is becoming a reality. Devices carried by nomadic users can seamlessly network with a variety of devices, both stationary and mobile, both nearby and remote, providing a wide range of functional capabilities, from base sensing and actuating to rich applications (e.g., smart spaces). This then allows the dynamic deployment of pervasive applications, which dynamically compose functional capabilities accessible in the pervasive network at the given time and place of an application request.

Amigo Interoperability Framework: Dynamically Integrating Heterogeneous Devices and Services

The Amigo Interoperability Framework provides middleware-layer mechanisms that enable integrating heterogeneous networked devices and services. It includes a service discovery and interaction interoperability architecture and a domotic architecture, which have been tested in combination in a proof-of-concept prototype.

Service discovery protocol interoperability in the mobile environment

The emergence of portable computers and wireless technologies has introduced new challenges for middleware. Mobility brings new requirements and is becoming a key characteristic. Mobile devices may move around different areas and have to interact with different types of networks, services and may be exposed to new communication paradigms. Thus, mobile distributed systems need to dynamically detect and adapt their interaction protocols to interoperate with services available in the environment. As a result, middleware for mobile devices must overcome two heterogeneity issues to provide interoperability in the mobile environment, i.e, heterogeneity of discovery protocols and of interaction protocols between services. Whereas adaptation techniques from reflective middleware are suitable for the latter, it is more problematic for the former if both issues are addressed concurrently. Specifically, reflective mechanisms consume too many resources like bandwidth, memory and CPU, which are limited on the mobile devices. This paper first highlights why current solutions to interoperability fail to realize service discovery protocol interoperability with both high performance and low resource consumption. Second, this paper addresses this open issue by using software architecture concepts enhanced with event-based parsing techniques to provide efficient, lightweight and flexible mechanisms to bring full service discovery interoperability to any existing mobile platform.

Protocole de découverte de services interopérable en réseau ad hoc

Lexpansion des reseaux sans fil temoigne de la demande croissante des utilisateurs pour un acces a des services, a tout moment. Lun des enjeux majeurs vise a decouvrir a la vo- lee les services en vue de leur utilisation. A cette fin, des protocoles de decouverte de services, toujours plus nombreux, ont ete proposes et standardises. A lorigine de nouvelles incompatibi- lites, ces protocoles demeurent inexploitables dans les reseaux ad hoc. Aussi, nous introduisons un intergiciel integrant un protocole de decouverte de services web pour reseaux ad hoc ainsi quun systeme de traduction de protocoles de decouverte de services afin doffrir aux utilisa- teurs un acces transparent aux services tout en garantissant leur interoperabilite. ABSTRACT. The abundance of networked devices circumvents the need for providing access to services, anywhere, anytime. In such a context, one of the major issues lies in discovering services dynamically. For this purpose, a wide range of protocols have been proposed. While creating new sources of incompatibilities, these protocols cannot be directly deployed over MANETs, and, hence remain a major obstacle to the development of MANET-enabled services. In order to overcome these issues, we present a middleware that enables ubiquitous access to heterogeneous services based on automatic service discovery and dynamic translation of dis- covery protocols. This middleware includes a service discovery protocol customised to operate in MANETs, along with a translation component guaranteeing service interoperability.