Towards service orientation in pervasive computing systems

The emergence of the service-oriented computing paradigm has opened the possibility of using dynamic binding of application requirements to the resources needed to fulfill application tasks. Especially in pervasive computing that is characterized by disconnected operation and mobility, the process of using service specifications and dynamic binding becomes critical. In this paper, we summarize our ongoing work in the area of integrating service orientation into pervasive computing using the notion of specifying service requirements and using these specifications to bind to the available resources dynamically instead of hardwiring them statically. We term these specifications programmable requirements since they can be interpreted at run time to bind to a resource satisfying those specifications. Interestingly this approach also satisfies the basis for two key types of adaptation prevalent in pervasive computing systems - functional and architectural - as we show in this paper.