Semantic service substitution in pervasive environments

Abstract

A computing infrastructure where everything is a service offers many new system and application possibilities. Among the main challenges, however, is the issue of service substitution for the application execution in such heterogeneous environments. An application would like to continue to execute even when a service disappears, or it would like to benefit from the environment by using better services with better QoS when possible. In this article, we define a generic service model and describe the equivalence relations between services considering the functionalities they propose and their non functional QoS properties. We define semantic equivalence relations between services and equivalence degree between non functional QoS properties. Using these relations we propose semantic substitution mechanisms upon the appearance and disappearance of services that fits the application needs. We developed a prototype as a proof of concept and evaluated its efficiency over a real use case.