Supporting Dynamic Service Updates in Pervasive Applications

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) facilitates the construction of complex pervasive applications, but the highly dynamic nature of pervasive computing brings challenges to the regular maintenance of these applications. Furthermore, pervasive applications are required to provide continuous services during their maintenances. A promising approach for providing uninterrupted service is to permit dynamic updates while keeping applications up-to-date. In this paper, we present a dynamic service update framework to support transparent updates of running applications, and illustrate update mechanisms of the framework. Novel features of our approach are that it supports dynamic interface adaptability if the interface type of an updated service has been changed and that it can automatically recover from update failures if the behavior of an updated application is unwanted. Experiments show that our approach is effective and beneficial when applied to pervasive applications and the performance overhead is acceptable in relation to the advantages.