C-ANIS – A Contextual, Automatic and Dynamic Service-Oriented Integration Framework

Abstract

Ubiquitous computing environments are highly dynamic by nature. Services provided by different devices can appear and disappear as, for example, devices join and leave these environments. This article contributes to the handling of this dynamicity by discussing service integration in the context of service-oriented architectures. We propose C-ANIS: a Contextual, Automatic and dyNamic Integration framework of Services. C-ANIS distinguishes two different approaches to service integration. Automatic integration automatically extends the capabilities of an existing service, leaving the interface unchanged. On-demand integration builds a new service on request from a list of given services. We have implemented C-ANIS based on the OSGi/Felix framework and thereby demonstrated the feasibility of these two service integration concepts. We have also implemented a toolkit providing two different techniques to realize the automatic and on-demand service integration concepts: Redirection, i.e. calling interfaces and replication, i.e. copying implementations of services 1 .

Orthogonal Classification of Middleware Technologies

“…• Spontaneous substitution [11]: transparent substitution between services depending on QoS properties. [11] proposes a transparent substitution between services based on QoS properties. This middleware service is capable of interchanging transparently between services, without disturbing the application execution using a QoS metric that "measures" how close two services are in terms of quality of service.…”

“…• Spontaneous composition [11]: transparent composition that extend transparently the environment with new functionalities without prior demand from user, the environment is extended with new service implementations, new service quality of service but the same service interfaces are still published. By that the applications and users are not aware of all these changes, as they have access to the same interfaces, even if these interfaces offer different implementations.…”

“…The approach is done spontaneously, without the user intervention and is based on a graph colouring techniques [2]. • Spontaneous substitution [11]: transparent substitution between services depending on QoS properties. [11] proposes a transparent substitution between services based on QoS properties.…”

MySIM

“…For that, a stop condition is provided to prevent duplicating services. For more details on the spontaneous service integration life cycle please refer to C-ANIS [8]. MySIM is composed of several services, gathered under four modules (cf.…”