DSOA: A Service Oriented Architecture for Ubiquitous Applications

Ubiquitous environments are composed by a wide variety of devices, each one with different characteristics like communication protocol, programming and hardware platforms These devices range from powerful equipments, like PCs, to limited ones, like cell phones, sensors and actuators The services provided by an ubiquitous environment rely on the interaction among devices In order to support the development of applications in this context, the heterogeneity of communication protocols must be abstracted and the functionalities dynamically provided by devices should be easily available to application developers This paper proposes a Device Service Oriented Architecture (DSOA) as an abstraction layer to help organizing devices and its resources in a ubiquitous environment, while hiding details about communication protocols from developers Based on DSOA, a lightweight middleware (uOS) and a high level protocol (uP) were developed A use case is presented to illustrate the application of these concepts.