A Presence Service Architecture for Supporting Spontaneous Interaction

Ubiquitous computing environments create a seamless boundary between atoms and bits. Especially, in the near future , embedding various types of sensors in our daily lives enables an application to customize their behavior according to its user´s situation. Also, physical objects in our daily lives can be used to manipulate information in cyber spaces. however, the vision requires a new software infrastructure that collaborates various appliances in a spontaneous way. The paper proposes an architecture to realize the vision in our daily computing environments by creating a society of appliances. Our architecture is called Pervasive Servers, that embeds micro servers called stationary pervasive servers everywhere. Also, a personal pervasive server that is carried by each person coordinates the embedded servers that are near the person. The architecture is very attractive because it is easy to personalize the coordination according to each person´s policy. We also show that there are several useful applications based on the architecture.