The Service Ecosystem: Dynamic Self-Aggregation of Pervasive Communication Services

The continuous growth in ubiquitous computing and network connectivity in our everyday environments calls for a deep rethinking of traditional communication service architectures. In pervasive scenarios, manually configuring communication service/protocols is becoming mostly unthinkable, due to the high heterogeneity of devices and services, and to the decentralized and embedded nature of the involved entities. The next step is towards the "componentization" of communication services, i.e. services implemented and exposed by software components, rather than static protocol/service layers. Stack layering is likewise expected to be replaced by the dynamic and flexible aggregation of such components. Canonical software engineering models for component composition and syntactic service interfaces can hardly tackle the openness and dynamicity of such envisioned pervasive communication services. Therefore, this paper proposes an innovative ecology-inspired composition model for pervasive services. The key idea is to exploit semantics as an overlay for service aggregation rather than a mere additional description of a static service.