Software Infrastructure For Smart Space And Its Resource Management

Smart space is a working or living space with embedded computers, information appliances, and multi-modal sensors, allowing people to perform tasks efficiently by offering unprecedented information access and computing assistance. It highlights physical integration and spontaneous interoperation, the two substaintial characteristics of pervasive computing. This thesis explores the two key technologies for smart spaces: the software infrastructure and the resource management.The author believes that the development of smart spaces falls into three successive phases: individual smart space, open smart space and smart community. In first phase, the reaseach focus on building a smart human-computer interactive space, it emphasizes the communitcation and the coordination mechanism among the software modules in a relatively close smart space. In the second phase, the mobile and handheld devices become more and more popular in pervasive computing environment. The devices, roaming with their users, can discover the existence of smart space environment and spontaneously take use of the resources and the services in the space to perform users' task in an enhanced fasion. In the third phases, with individual smart space systems becoming more and more popular, a community of smart spaces is considered as a whole. We need to study the inter-space operation and inter-space resource management mechanism in this phase. In order to support the interoperation between mobile device and smart space from the software infrastructure's layer, we have made the following revision or extension based on Smart Platform (a software infrastructure developed by our laboratory that originally designed to facilitate individual smart space). 1) Environment discovery mechanism based on location information; 2) Bulk-like communication; 3) Support for hybrid communication channel via proxy agent; 4) Distributed resource management for mobile devices. Those efforts have made Smart Platform better fulfill the demands of open smart space phase and pave the road to support smart space community.Resource management is a very important approach to achieve spontaneous interoperation in smart space. The orginal Smart Platform, a multi-agent system, provided very simple and half-baked resource management via inter-agent dependencies resolution mechanism. This author has studied the mobile device supported resource management in an open smart space. We designed a Resource Request Language (RRL) and developed the resource manager as a sub-system of Smart Platform. Agent can send request to the manager through RRL. The resource manager will then process the request and choose the approiate resource according to the description, attributes and relevant knowledge representation stored in the database. The resource manager may also combine atomic services into a combined service to fulfill the request if necessary.At the end of this thesis, we introduce how to develop smart space using Smart Platform. Serveal user friendly development tools are also provided. They cover almost every phase (design, developing, debugging and maintenance) of the development of a smart space. The usability of Smart Platform has been greatly improved with these tools.