Enabling Flexible and Continuous Capability Invocation in Mobile Prosumer Environments.docVIP

Sensors 2012, 12, 8930-8954; doi:10.3390/s120708930 OPEN ACCESS sensors ISSN 1424-8220 /journal/sensors Article Enabling Flexible and Continuous Capability Invocation in Mobile Prosumer Environments Ramon Alcarria 1,*, Tomas Robles 1, Augusto Morales 1, Diego López-de-Ipi?a 2 and Unai Aguilera 2 1 Department of Telematics Engineering, Technical University of Madrid, Avenida Complutense n. 30, Ciudad Universitaria, 28040 Madrid, Spain; E-Mails: trobles@dit.upm.es (T.R.); amorales@dit.upm.es (A.M.) 2 Deusto Institute of Technology, University of Deusto, Avda. Universidades 24, 48007 Bilbao, Spain; E-Mails: dipina@deusto.es (D.L.-I.); unai.aguilera@deusto.es (U.A.) * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail: ralcarria@dit.upm.es; Tel.: +34-915-495-700 (ext. 3035); Fax: +34-915-439-652. Received: 22 March 2012; in revised form: 17 June 2012 / Accepted: 19 June 2012 / Published: 28 June 2012 Abstract: Mobile prosumer environments require the communication with heterogeneous devices during the execution of mobile services. These environments integrate sensors, actuators and smart devices, whose availability continuously changes. The aim of this paper is to design a reference architecture for implementing a model for continuous service execution and access to capabilities, i.e., the functionalities provided by these devices. The defined architecture follows a set of software engineering patterns and includes some communication paradigms to cope with the heterogeneity of sensors, actuators, controllers and other devices in the environment. In addition, we stress the importance of the flexibility in capability invocation by allowing the communication middleware to select the access technology and change the communication paradigm when dealing with smart devices, and by describing and evaluating two algorithms for resource access management. Keywords: prosumer; software engineering; u