Omnisphere: a personal communication environment

Small ubiquitous devices connected by wireless networks will become future Internet appliances. To support them, communication networks must evolve to seamlessly assist appliances and provide advanced functionalities. We present a personal communication environment called Omnisphere that provides a communication and information universe surrounding wireless appliances. It is based on a high level concept called ambient services that allows to construct complex services out of primitive ones by connecting them with typed data flows. A typed data flow is an abstract view of communication between ambient services. It encapsulates three elements: channels, control, and metadata. Omnisphere provides a predefined service for discovery of component services and binding them together with data flows. Our strategy for service discovery is to delegate most of the operations to the network infrastructure and to automate them as much as possible. Based on the user ID and appliance ID, Omnisphere retrieves the information that restricts the set of possible services: User preferences, device capabilities, and context. It then makes use of existing discovery protocols such as SLP, Jini, or UPnP to discover relevant services and matches them with the required characteristics. Such a discovery process relieves appliances, which may have limited resources, from the operation that may consume scarce resources and may require the availability of different discovery protocols on the appliance.