Spontaneous interaction framework for thin-client access to services

Abstract

Many physical spaces such as homes, museums, airports and shopping malls are being augmented with computers, sensors, wireless hotspots to provide digital content and services. However, often specialized hardware and software are needed to access the services available in a particular space. This paper proposes a lightweight service framework which can aggregate services offered by heterogeneous devices and sources in a smart space and allow the users of currently available mobile clients, such as, smart phones, PDAs and Ultra-Mobile PCs, to spontaneously discover and access services in heterogeneous spaces. By leveraging a captive and service portal mechanism, the desirable services can be discovered and presented automatically to the mobile client of the user, while the mobile devices do not need to install any additional software or hardware. In this paper, we present the system requirements for spontaneous interaction, the service framework design and implementation details. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.