Proximity-based federation of smart objects

Our real world environments today are filled with lots of embedded intelligent devices with communication capabilities like smart phone, embedded computers, sensor devices, etc., which we refer to as Smart Objects (SOs). Most ubiquitous computing applications are limited to the scope of two stereotyped scenarios, i.e., the location-transparent service continuation, and the context-aware service provision. Some researchers think that the potential of the ubiquitous and/or pervasive computing is limited because of the lack of its formal models. In our previous work, we introduced a new framework organized in a hierarchy of formal models. This framework allows the SOs to dynamically and autonomously reconstruct their federation configurations depending on their location and context change. This federation reconstruction is done without using any centralized control. A federation is modeled by a catalytic reaction which is inspired by a chemical reaction, and each application with a complex scenario of SO federations is modeled by a catalytic reaction network. We use graph rewriting rules to implement the federation mechanism, where the nodes and the edges of a graph respectively represent the SOs and their connections. This federation mechanism itself is inspired by the biological RNA (RiboNucleic Acid) replication mechanism. Here, we revise our framework and propose a new simplified set of graph rewriting rules for federating SOs as a catalytic reaction. This new set of rules is less complex and easier to understand. We also introduce an extra set of rules to deal with the exception handling that may occur during the federation process. Our main goal is to formally prove the validity of our rewriting rules for implementing any catalytic reaction. This guarantees both the generality and the correctness of out framework for implementing any complex federation scenarios that can be described as catalytic reaction networks.