A Document centric approach for supporting incremental deployment of pervasive applications

This paper explores system issues for enabling incremental deploy- ment of pervasive application - the problem of how to deploy and gradually enhance the functionalities of applications in a pervasive environment. We present a system architecture, FedNet that pro- vides the foundation for incremental deployment and uses a docu- ment centric approach utilizing a profile based artefact framework and a task based application framework. Our artefact framework represents an instrumented physical artefact as a collection of ser- vice profiles and expresses these services in generic documents. Pervasive applications are expressed as a collection of functional tasks (independent of the implementation) in a corresponding doc- ument. A runtime component provides the foundation for mapping these tasks to the corresponding service provider artefacts. This mapping is spontaneous and thus enables gradual addition of ser- vices. Primary advantages of our approach are twofold- firstly, it allows end users to deploy pervasive applications and instrumented artefacts easily and gradually. Secondly, it allows developers to write applications in a generic way regardless of the constraints of the target environment. We describe an implemented prototype of FedNet, and show examples of its use in a real life deployment by the end users to illustrate its feasibility.