Proxy-based service mobility support for OSGi frameworks

Abstract

The Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi) aims to provide home devices and appliances with a standard service platform of a common gateway to the Internet. With the OSGi service framework all the devices and appliances can thus harness smart service functions for enhanced service automation so as to be creating a smart homenetwork space. Extending the OSGi goals, the service framework can be used as the underlying platform to implement so called ubiquitous computing services by incorporating additional service mobility functions into the existing OSGi. In this thesis, we introduce a proxy-based service mobility support designed and implemented on top of the standard OSGi service framework as an extension of OSGi technology to the ubiquitous computing services. In this approach, since the service mobility is accomplished by proxy interface, the costly migration of application services, libraries and data to the location of the mobile user can be avoided. By installing a proxy at the framework of mobile user``s current location with the same interface used to the server, the mobile user can make use of the services of the visiting OSGi framework in the same way used on the services. This approach would be particularly useful when the user mobility is high and context-aware computing services involve multiple contexts and services of devices and appliances in the user``s own remote space, such as home and office. We propose architecture for proxy-based service mobility support to be added to OSGi Framework. We use a context-aware home security management service to test the feasibility and performance of the proposed scheme. With the mobility support for ubiquitous computing services in the community environments with OSGi Framework, our proposed lightweight implementation of proxy-based system will provide users with transparent interactions to the services and service developers with easy integration of context-aware computing services into OSGi servic...