A Description Language for Universal Understandings of Heterogeneous Services in Pervasive Computing

A pervasive computing environment consists of a variety of devices, such as tiny sensor nodes, handheld devices, consumer electronics, and PCs, which are capable of communicating with others via a communication platform like Bluetooth, ZigBee, UPnP, and DLNA. Those devices should be able to communicate one another to provide users with richer pervasive computing environment, however, different communication platforms postulate different abstractions on services. This abstraction difference disables universal understandings of heterogeneous services about their compatibility and interoperability across different platforms, thereby disabling cross-platform device interaction. To address this problem, this paper proposes an XML-based technique, called Universal Service Description Language (USDL), to describe the heterogeneous services in a platform-independent way. It provides applications with self-contained documents to mechanically determine the best strategy to share the resources among multiple users in a pervasive computing environment. In this paper, we organize the requirements to deriving common abstraction scheme, and show how USDL is advantageous in pervasive computing environment by describing our experience in developing a range of applications using them.