Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) is a compelling vision for how people will interact with multiple computer systems in the course of their daily lives. To date, practitioners have created a variety of infrastructures, middleware and toolkits to provide the flexibility, ease of programming and the necessary coordination of distributed software and hardware components in physical spaces.
However, to-date no one approach has been adopted as a default or de-facto standard. Consequently the field risks losing momentum as fragmentation occurs. In particular, the goal of ubiquitous deployments may stall as groups deploy and trial incompatible point solutions in specific locations. In their
defense, researchers in the field argue that it is too early to standardize and that room is needed to explore specialized domain-specific solutions.
In the absence of an agreed upon set of standards, we argue that the community must consider a methodology that allows systems to evolve and specialize, while at the same time allowing the development of portable applications and integrated deployments that work between between sites.
To address this we studied the programming models of many commercial and research ubicomp systems. Through this survey we gained an understanding of the shared abstractions required in a core programming model suitable for both application portability and systems integration.
Based on this study we designed an extensible core model called the Ubicomp
Common Model (UCM) to describe a representative sample of ubiquitous systems
to date. The UCM is instantiated in a flexible and extensible platform called the Ubicomp Integration Framework (UIF) to
adapt ubicomp systems to this model.
Through application development and integration experience with a composite
campus environment, we provide strong evidence that this model is adequate for
application development and that the complexity of developing adapters to several
representative systems is not onerous. The performance overhead introduced by
introducing the centralized UIF between applications and an integrated system is
reasonable. Through careful analysis and the use of well understood approaches
to integration, this thesis demonstrates the value of our methodology that directly leverages the significant contributions of past research in our quest for ubicomp application and systems interoperability.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/2478 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Blackstock, Michael Anthony |
| Publisher | University of British Columbia |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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