An Adapter Chaining Scheme for Service Continuity in Ubiquitous Environments with Adapter Evaluation

A key feature of ubiquitous computing is service continuity which allows a user to transparently continue his task regardless of his movement. For service continuity, the underlying system needs to not only discover a service satisfying a user's request, but also provide an interface differences resolution scheme if the interface of the service found is not the same as that of the service requested. For resolving interface mismatches, one of solutions is to use an interface adapter. The most serious problem in the interface adapter-based approach is the overhead of adapter generation. There are many research efforts about adapter generation load reduction and this paper focuses on an adapter chaining scheme to reduce the number of necessary adapters among different service interfaces. We propose a construction-time adaptation loss evaluation scheme and an adapter chain construction algorithm, which finds an adapter chain with minimal adaptation loss.