Proposal of a clean slate network architecture for ubiquitous services provisioning

Abstract

The Pervasive Computing field is almost always addressed from application, middleware, sensing or Human Computer Interaction perspective. Thus, solutions are usually designed at application level or involve developing new hardware. Although current layered network architectures (mainly TCP/IP stack) have enabled internetworking of lots of different devices and services, they are neither well-suited nor optimized for pervasive computing applications. Hence, we firmly believe that we should have an underlying network architecture providing the flexible, context-aware and adaptable communication infrastructure required to ease the development of ubiquitous services and applications. Herein, we propose a clean slate network architecture to deploy ubiquitous services in a Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing environment. The architecture is designed to avoid hierarchical layering, so we propose a service-oriented approach for a flow-oriented context-aware network architecture where communications are composed on the fly (using reusable components) according to the needs and requirements of the consumed service.