Discovering services with restricted location scope in ubiquitous environments

Abstract

In ubiquitous computing systems, the mobility of users and their devices results in recurring disconnections and recon-nections with different networks, and the corresponding dynamic change of the network and domain-specific resources and services accessible from the user's device. On the other hand, some services are available to be used only by users that are located in a well defined region. In this highly dynamic and heterogeneous scenario, applications must be capable of discovering the appropriate instances of the required services in each visited network or region. In order to support such spontaneous interaction, we propose a discovery service based on the notion of a (geographic) location scope. This discovery service is one of the core services of the MoCA architecture, a middleware that supports the development and deployment of location-aware ubiquitous applications.