Towards the Autonomous Management of Virtual Devices

Personal computing is experiencing a shift from conventional computer-centric approaches, where the overall user experience and quality of service is determined by the capability of a single device, towards human centric approaches forming implicit devices, also known as virtual devices or virtual appliances. Virtual devices exploit the strengths of a series of strong specific networked appliances for enhanced user experience and quality of service. In this paper we contribute towards the autonomous management of virtual devices, moving away from infrastructure based schemes with heavy user involvement to decentralized and zero touch (i.e. no user involvement) solutions. In doing so, we present the components and methodology behind a policy-driven autonomous framework for the dynamic discovery, selection, and composition of multimodal multi-device services. The framework operates in an ad hoc network setting and introduces a Service Overlay Network (SON) based definition of a virtual device.