Push Driven Service Composition in Personal Communication Environments
Résumé
Our current mode of communication is mainly based on thepullmodel in which the user requests information or initiates a communication stream. We believe that a personal communication environment should behave according to the push model in which a source of data or the network infrastructure takes care of preparing communications and proposing them to the user. In this proactive way of operation, the only user intervention is to choose the right communication flow. In this paper we present the service discovery and composition in Omnisphere, a personal communication environment for wireless appliances. All elements in Omnisphere are considered as services that can be dynamically discovered and composed to form complex communication applications. Based on user preferences, device capabilities, and context Omnisphere makes use of existing discovery protocols such as SLP, Jini, UPnP, or DNS-SD to discover relevant services. Service descriptors provide further information on the data types generated on output or accepted on input. All this information allows Omnisphere to configure services and user applications so that the user can benefit from complex communication applications composed on demand.