A Description Language for Universal Understandings of Heterogeneous Services in Pervasive Computing

A pervasive computing environment consists of a variety of devices, such as tiny sensor nodes, handheld devices, consumer electronics, and PCs, which are capable of communicating with others via a communication platform like Bluetooth, ZigBee, UPnP, and DLNA. Those devices should be able to communicate one another to provide users with richer pervasive computing environment, however, different communication platforms postulate different abstractions on services. This abstraction difference disables universal understandings of heterogeneous services about their compatibility and interoperability across different platforms, thereby disabling crossplatform device interaction. To address this problem, this paper proposes an XML-based technique, called Universal Service Description Language (USDL), to describe the heterogeneous services in a platform-independent way. It provides applications with self-contained documents to mechanically determine the best strategy to share the resources among multiple users in a pervasive computing environment. In this paper, we organize the requirements to deriving common abstraction scheme, and show how USDL is advantageous in pervasive computing environment by describing our experience in developing a range of applications using them.

普适计算环境由多种设备组成，例如微小的传感器节点、手持设备、消费电子产品和个人计算机等，这些设备能够通过诸如蓝牙、ZigBee、UPnP和DLNA等通信平台与其他设备进行通信。这些设备应该能够相互通信，以便为用户提供更丰富的普适计算环境，然而，不同的通信平台对服务有不同的抽象。这种抽象差异使得无法对异构服务在不同平台间的兼容性和互操作性有通用的理解，从而阻碍了跨平台的设备交互。为了解决这个问题，本文提出了一种基于XML的技术，称为通用服务描述语言（USDL），以一种与平台无关的方式描述异构服务。它为应用程序提供自包含的文档，以便在普适计算环境中机械地确定在多个用户之间共享资源的最佳策略。在本文中，我们梳理了推导通用抽象方案的需求，并通过描述我们使用它们开发一系列应用程序的经验，展示了USDL在普适计算环境中的优势。