Spatial-aware service management in a pervasive environment

We can perceive the advent of Internet of Things enriched pervasive environments attributed to the fast emerging of embedded and interconnected intelligent devices and sensors. However, most of current pervasive systems are still being developed based on the so-called the system is the application philosophy, causing the developers to take care of all technical details from the ground up. There is relatively little research focuses on building higher-level abstractions so that the burdens of developers can be relieved. The abstraction of a “place,” also known as an “Ambient,” is an essential context information when implementing a pervasive system. The quality of the results of a service composition can be improved if the concept of Ambient is taken into account. This paper aims to investigate the use of Ambient in the pervasive system systematically. We propose several new spatial abstractions and a spatial-aware service management scheme for the Ambient on top of a robust service management protocol. Formal verification, complexity analysis, and experiments are performed to verify the robustness, efficiency, and performance of the proposed approach, respectively.