15-05-2014, 10:30 AM
SSP: Smart Service Provider A Smart Environment Providing Contextual Services on Android Mobile Devices
Smart Service Provider .pdf (Size: 1.07 MB / Downloads: 13)
Abstract
Smart environments are increasingly available and support
users in their daily activities in different ways. This paper presents a
service-based approach for users active in a smart environment such as a
building, campus or public place. The concept is illustrated through the
SSP project which provides environment-specific and contextual services
on mobile devices running the Android platform.
Introduction
We are experiencing an increasing level of connectivity and automation in our
environment. At lot of devices are proposed to consumers to help them in their
common tasks such as driving, road navigation, accessing information, booking
or buying things and providing contextual advice. In fact, since the rapid devel-
opment of mobile technologies and applications, users are constantly connected
to other users, infrastructures and services. There have also been important
developments in the field of sensors and controllers allowing the development of
smart mobile devices (e.g. iPhone, Android, GPS navigation systems). These
devices have quickly become the essential companion of average users: they are
their calendars, mailboxes and sources of information, allowing them to locate
themselves, to communicate and so on. Environments are also benefiting from
the rapid development and miniaturisation of sensors: they are becoming smart.
So called ”smart environments” are network-enabled devices and applications
capable of adapting their behaviour in order to provide services and to make the
life of users more comfortable. As proposed by Das and Cook [8], a smart en-
vironment can be defined as one that is able to autonomously acquire and apply
knowledge about the environment and adapt to its inhabitants’ preferences and
requirements in order to improve their experience. They point out four main
components that constitute smart environments: smart devices and embedded
systems, wireless mobile communication, a computing paradigm and a middle-
ware.
Related work
In recent years, ”smart environments” have become a dynamic field of research
and many projects have been developed around this topic. The field is divided
into several sub-topics such as ”smart-homes” and ”intelligent buildings” with
projects such as EasyLiving from Microsoft [7] which focuses on the interac-
tion between users and the multimedia devices in a house, ”Hestia” from the
University of Fribourg [6] presenting a solution to integrate user activity in the
management of heating systems and the ”Aware Home” from Georgia Tech [16].
Different aspects within those topics are investigated such as security, authenti-
cation [1], context-awareness [10] and monitoring of user activity [14]. Another
interesting aspect is the development of context-aware architectures and mid-
dlewares for smart environments, like those proposed in HP’s CoolTown2 , the
Aura3 project from Carnegie Mellon University and the Georgia Tech Context
Toolkit [9]. In [19], the authors describe MoCA, a project that is close to the
service provider presented in this paper except that they take the user’s location
into consideration and not their profile and activities. Those projects treat dif-
ferent aspects of the topic, propose interesting solutions and they have inspired
the concept of services in smart environments as we propose in this paper.
Services for mobile devices
In contrast to the concept of applications loadable from a centralised source,
we propose a different approach where services are contextually available within
specific environments (e.g. campus, shopping mall, train station) like in MoCA
[19]. This notion comes from the concept of applications that are not loadable
once and permanently installed, but available and installable at the time the
user is in the environment proposing it and are automatically uninstalled when
the user leaves the environment. Such service are still applications and not web
services.
Coordination and communication in uMove
The communication in uMove is managed by a component called the Coordi-
nation manager. This component allows the different entities (actors, sengets,
observers, viewers) to transparently communicate with each other and also al-
lows different uMove systems to be connected to one another (Fig. 2). Each
entity communicates together in the same way regardless of whether they are
local (same uMove) or remote (on a mobile uMove).
Conclusion and future work
In this paper, we have presented the SSP project which provides contextualized
services in smart environments. The project is based on the concepts of KUI
and CMP and is implemented in Java using uMove, Coordination and Moni-
toring APIs. Each user entering an SSP environment with an Android device
running the client SmartApp is identified and integrated into the system and can
benefit from the services available in this environment. We have also presented
two prototypes with a server-based application that provide services and client
applications running on the Android platform 2.0.
The next important step now will be to carry out user evaluations on the
usefulness of the service concept and do usability testing in smart environments
such as train stations, nursing homes and university campuses. We are currently
working on a project that will propose a service management both on the server-
side and on the client. This service manager will allow to add and remove
services on servers and deal with the upload and removal of service clients (APK
applications) on Android devices.