| In a distributed environment, devices and components can share their resources by offering different services. By abstracting devices using the services that they offer, we can define a service-based architecture that readily supports the discovery and creation of new, composite services to expand the capabilities available in the distributed environment. Pervasive environments such as a Home Area Network (HAN), meeting/conference room, etc. are examples of a highly heterogeneous distributed environment that can exploit such a service-based architecture. In this thesis, I propose an architecture for service delivery and composition in a pervasive environment. The proposed architecture uses external third-party service enablers to automatically compose new services and deliver them to a pervasive environment. Composing new services using available services and deploying them in a pervasive environment makes such environments more attractive to their mostly non-technical users. It also reduces costs associated with offering services in those environments, since human intervention is not required. In this thesis, I review the relevant literature, explain the implementation of the prototype of my architecture and present the results of its performance evaluation. The developed prototype shows the feasibility of my proposed architecture (implementation as well as performance wise) and uses a unique way of deploying a composite service as well as a novel method of applying a workflow repository for service composition. |
