A Document centric approach for supporting Incremental Deployment of Pervasive Applications

This paper explores system issues for enabling incremental deployment 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 provides the foundation for incremental deployment and uses a document 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 service 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 document. 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 services. 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.