An Jini-based infrastructure for networked appliance management and adaptation

Networked appliances (NAs) are popularly viewed as one of the major Internet growth areas of the future and home networks and networked vehicles represent just two possible application areas. The potential market for such networks is great, but they prove difficult to deploy, configure and manage due to the dynamic behaviour stemming from their usage context. The lack of network administrators in the home or car requires that the networks, and their services, are capable of self-management and adaptation to correct conflicts and inconsistencies. We consider the use of techniques used by the self-adaptive software community to realize the self-management of the federation of services provided by a network of appliances. In particular we describe a management infrastructure, based on Jini network technology, which provides capabilities to adapt services according to usage context and demonstrate its application using a networked vehicle simulation.