Service discovery in an open ubiquitous computing environment

Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) has been a vision for decades. As a new model of human-computer interaction in which information processing is deeply integrated into everyday objects and activities, it is widely recognized as the substitute for the desktop paradigm. Many ubicomp systems have been proposed and developed by research community since the concept was proposed. However, it is still a technology largely embodied in research lab prototypes instead of real world products and services today. As suspected by many researchers, there has been a chasm in the adoption of ubicomp technology for the mass market. My work is motivated by the desire to understand and diagnose the chasm, thereby obtaining possible solutions to it.;This dissertation demonstrates the existence of such an adoption gap through a survey on top-tier ubicomp research projects in recent years. It further reveals the impediments in the adoption process and suggests guidelines for successfully crossing the adoption chasm. In particular, this dissertation proposes an approach to reconciling research advances in this field and their mass adoption by deploying an open ubiquitous environment. Here open means that context-aware services and applications from various geographic locations and administrative domains can join the environment at anytime and interact with other entities on demand.;This dissertation introduces SmartContacts, a social context discovery system that demonstrates the feasibility of realizing Internet-scale context-awareness. It then describes OUCE, a platform for context service provision and discovery in an open ubiquitous environment and two example context-aware applications. OUCE emphasizes scalability of component interactions and leverages the Web infrastructure and COTS devices. It lowers the deployment and maintenance cost for novel ubicomp applications, and minimizes behavior change requirements for users. This leads to a low transition cost for adopters and a smooth adoption process for ubicomp technologies.;The evaluation shows that OUCE has a better performance than existing ubicomp systems in processing large-scale concurrent service discovery transactions. It also shows that the REST service style of OUCE has less communication and processing overhead compared to the SOAP Web services adopted in other ubicomp systems, especially on enabling atomic context services.