Extend the Service and Component in Meta-level for Pervasive Computing

Powerful and cheap computing devices are flooding the world, which arises the primary challenge for pervasive computing: how to represent devices and their functions without distracting user attention. Most existing pervasive computing platforms use traditional components and services as the answer. However, both of them have limitations. Existing services in the form of Interface are small in granularity, lacking of semantics and distracting to invoke remotely. Existing components are lacking of a unified model for representing dependencies and a mechanism for dealing with these dependencies, especially the runtime dependency. In this paper, we extend the service and component in meta-level for pervasive computing. Firstly, we extend them in meta-model, making the service as the aggregation of Interface. Secondly, we entitle semantics to services by applying ontology and provide a new service invoking mechanism. Thirdly, we wrap Component by the enhanced service to decouple the compile-time and runtime dependencies; and introduce a novel group interaction mechanism for multi-service interaction. Finally, a prototype platform which applies enhanced service and component is presented; and two demos are used to show how the extended service and component work and benefit.