Towards opportunistic service composition in dynamic ad hoc environments

Abstract

Service composition in pervasive computing envisions the collaboration of services provided by mobile and embedded devices to achieve complex application requirements. Although some research has investigated the composition of services in dynamic ad hoc settings, it is not clear how service composites manage the conflict between application layer complexities and network unreliability that may cause them to fail repeatedly. This paper outlines investigations on opportunistic service composition as a solution for managing complex service requests in mobile infrastructure-less environments. Opportunistic service composition dynamically transfers control among service providers to bind and execute services in a decentralised way. Unlike existing fragmentation and broker-based designs, it interleaves provider allocation with service execution to counteract mobility in a flexible manner. Early simulation results suggest that this approach reduces the failure probability and communication overhead of complex service requests. This illustrates that opportunistic service composition may be feasible to manage collaboration in dynamic ad hoc environments. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.