SYSSU-DTS: um sistema de suporte à computação ubíqua baseado em espaço de tuplas distribuído

Abstract

The evolution of mobile technologies allows the emerging of ubiquitous systems, able to anticipate user’s needs and to seamlessly adapt to context changes. These systems present the problem of dynamic adaptation in a highly distributed, heterogeneous and volatile environment, since it may be difficult to collect and process context information from distributed unknown sources. The problem faced is the management of contextual data in scenarios with mobility and intermittent connections between mobile devices and servers. In order to facilitate the development of such systems, this work extends an existing support system based on centralized tuple spaces, called SysSU (LIMA et al., 2011), aiming at the management of distributed information. Hence, a decentralized tuple space approach is adopted, offering to ubiquitous systems components the capability of interaction and cooperation in scenarios of total decentralization. Thus, this work introduces SysSU-DTS (System Support for Ubiquity - Distribute Tuple Space), a system support that provides functionality for coordinating ubiquitous systems in open environments, where no assumptions about available resources should be made. It focuses on ubiquitous systems based on mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets and ultrabooks, which can communicate through a Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET). SysSU-DTS represents context information by tuples and allows a transparent access to spread context, as follows: (i)local access, which accesses an internal device tuple space; (ii) infrastructured access, tuple spaces located on a server accessed using an infrastructured network; or (iii) Ad hoc access, interacting directly with tuple spaces located in nearby devices via the formation of an Ad hoc network. From the access to different context providers, ubiquitous and context-aware applications, using SysSU-DTSs support, can have an insight of global context related to the system entities. In addition, SysSU-DTS implements a scope mechanism that allows the formation of available contextual information subsets. This mechanism restricts access to contextual tuples only to members of the same scope, avoiding unnecessary information management. This dissertation reports some experimental results obtained in a performance evaluation using a testbed of smartphones and tablets. The evaluation shows the practical feasibility of our approach and point out how SysSU-DTS can grant context data distribution with dynamically adapting to local, infrastructured and distributed over Ad hoc networks context providers.