Scalable Computing and Communications: Theory and Practice

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Scalable Service Composition in Pervasive Computing

Joanna Siebert and Jiannong Cao

30.1   INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, a majority of the appliances in physical environments around us are embedded with computing capabilities. Also, devices with communicating capabilities are growing in numbers and becoming more powerful. How to coordinate these smart devices and make them serve people in a less obtrusive manner has become one of the main research concerns in pervasive computing. In the vision of pervasive computing [34], the environment built on the physical world with embedded computing devices is a medium that provides a user with all the functionality he or she needs. Such a functionality of a computational entity whose execution satisfies the requestor's requirement is called a service.

This chapter is concerned with scalable service composition in pervasive computing environments (PvCEs). Service composition refers to the process of finding the best suited service providers in the environment, identifying and combining component functionalities to compose a higher-level functionality. It also provides the means to perform the requested functionality and to make services better suited by adapting to changes in the request and in the environment. The motivation behind the research on service composition in PvCEs derives from the huge gap between the high-level requirements from pervasive computing applications and the complexity of the PvCEs. In order ...