Collaborative resource discovery in pervasive computing environments

Abstract

Collaborative resource discovery mechanisms are available for environments with stationary to semi- stationary resources. Yet in pervasive computing environments, where all nodes are mobile and many of which connect in and ad hoc manner, incorporating those dynamic mobile resources introduces a new set of requirements. The main issue is the lack of a reference point - a minimum of one stationary node that can be used as a start point for the environment's organizational architecture. As a result, one of the requirements becomes discovering when a resource is available and making it available for users/applications. Another is identifying the resources, their current locations and mobility attributes. In addition, there is the need to provide users/applications with the tools to identify moving resources and discover when they become unavailable. In this paper, we introduce a middleware framework for collaborative resource discovery in fully mobile and pervasive environments. The proposed framework provides decentralized mechanisms to dynamically discover resources, include them in a usable collective, and manage their mobility requirements. The framework involves a decentralized collaboration of software agents residing on the group members' nodes to collect, organize and efficiently exchange resources information, while keeping track of the nodes' mobility.