Semantic Service Substitution in Pervasive Environments

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of service substitution in heterogeneous pervasive environments by defining semantic equivalence relations and proposing mechanisms for seamless service replacement based on functionality and QoS.

Contribution

It introduces a generic service model with semantic and QoS equivalence relations and presents a semantic substitution mechanism with a prototype implementation.

Findings

Prototype demonstrates effective service substitution in real use case.

Semantic relations enable flexible and context-aware service replacement.

Mechanisms improve application resilience and QoS adaptation.

Abstract

A computing infrastructure where everything is a service offers many new system and application possibilities. Among the main challenges, however, is the issue of service substitution for the application execution in such heterogeneous environments. An application would like to continue to execute even when a service disappears, or it would like to benefit from the environment by using better services with better QoS when possible. In this article, we define a generic service model and describe the equivalence relations between services considering the functionalities they propose and their non functional QoS properties. We define semantic equivalence relations between services and equivalence degree between non functional QoS properties. Using these relations we propose semantic substitution mechanisms upon the appearance and disappearance of services that fits the application needs. We developed a prototype as a proof of concept and evaluated its efficiency over a real use case.