A Component-based Software Infrastructure for Ubiquitous Computing

Multiplication of mobile devices and generalized use of wireless networks imply changes on the design and execution of distributed software applications targeting ubiquitous computing. Many strong requirements have to be addressed: heterogeneity and limited resources of wireless networks and mobile devices, networked communications between distributed applications, dynamic discovery and automatic deployment on mobile devices. In this paper, we present a component-based software infrastructure to design, discover, deploy, and execute ubiquitous contextual services, i.e. distributed applications providing services to mobile end-users but only available from a particular place. These ubiquitous contextual services are designed as assemblies of distributed software components. These assemblies are dynamically discovered according to end-users´ physical location and device capabilities. Then, appropriate assemblies are automatically deployed on users´ devices. We have implemented this approach (the software infrastructure and a ubiquitous application example) on top of the OMG CORBA Component Model and the OpenCCM open source platform