A Unified Service-Enabled Logical Model for Devices Integration

As more embedded devices equipping with the capabilities of computing and communication, integrating devices through Web Services is considered to be the most potential solution for better interoperability among devices and up-level applications. But making a device Web service accessible is a costly and somewhat daunting task for the high heterogeneity of both hardware and software in devices. This paper proposes a logical device model to abstract and unify various devices as logical Web services. This model aims to promote the efficiency of accessing and deploying of Web services on embedded devices. It can support system simulation with `virtual´ devices which even don´t need to have a `real´ counterpart. A framework is provided to support DPWS protocol stack and deal with implementation issues with resource conflicts. It can adapt to a heavy device which is as powerful as a general desktop PC, or a light one which is very resource-constrained. Experiments with a tiny sensor with MCS-51 MCU, an air conditioner with ARM7 CPU and a notebook PC demonstrate the effects f proposed model and framework.