Design and evaluation of an interface-based naming system for supporting service synthesis in a ubiquitous computing environment

This paper considers the ubiquitous environment, in which a tremendous number of objects, such as physical devices, multimedia contents, and software components, exist everywhere. In order to provide and utilize various services transparently in such an environment, there must be a service synthesis technique that can dynamically construct services by mutually connecting objects. The realization of service synthesis requires a position-independent naming service which can securely and transparently call from the network the functions (functional objects) that act as the service component. The authors designed an interface-based naming service which can perform transparent calling of functional objects on the basis of interface information on the objects. The interface-based naming service not only can call functional objects efficiently from the network, but also can provide several useful features of service synthesis support: when two functional objects are interconnected, the required supplementary functional object is automatically determined, and when a function cannot be found, that function is realized equivalently by using multiple functional objects. This paper describes the architecture of the interface-based naming service, together with its algorithm. The approach is evaluated by simulation and it is shown that the interface-based naming service is a useful system in a ubiquitous environment with an increased number of objects and an enlarged network scale.