Smart Space Concepts, Properties and Architectures

Smart spaces have been actively emerging recently, and researchers are working on developing and testing smart spaces in the real world. They facilitate smart applications that are adaptive to user preferences and contexts. In doing so they must satisfy applications' dynamically changing resource needs. These objectives are achievable by cooperation among connected devices and ubiquitous interaction. Smart space architecture designs in the literature are mostly application specific, their concepts and components defined based on the specific needs of one application. In this paper, we formally define general smart space concepts and architectural models rigorously and discuss related architectural components (both hardware and software) in detail. Based on a literature review we summarize the discriminating properties that a smart space must possess, and its basic components and services to realize these properties. We present a comparative analysis of the architectural designs proposed thus far. A comprehensive smart space architecture is proposed and its semantic interoperability is discussed in detail. In addition, we provide a case study of a smart lighting system, where the properties of smart spaces are analyzed. Finally, we provide a roadmap for future smart space development.