Composable ad-hoc mobile services for universal interaction

Abstract

This paper introduces the notion of “universal interaction,” allowing a device to adapt its functionality to exploit services it discovers as it moves into a new environment. Users wish to invoke services - such as controlling the lights, printing locally, or reconfiguring the location of DNS servers from their mobile devices. But aptiotistandardizationof interfaces and methods for service invocation is infeasible. Thus, the challenge is to develop a new service architecture that supports heterogeneity in client devices and controlled objects, and which makes minimal assumptions about standard interfaces and control protocols. There are five components to a comprehensive solution to this problem: 1) allowing device mobility, 2) augmenting controllable objects to make them network-accessible, 3) building an underlying discovery architecture, 4) mapping between exported object interfaces and client device controls, and 5) building complex behaviors from underlying composableobjects. We motivate the need for these components by using an example scenario to derive the design requirements for our mobile services architecture. We then present a prototype implementation of elements of the architecture and some example services using it, including controls to audio/visual equipment, extensible mapping, server autoconfiguration, location tracking, and local printer access.