OSGi Bundles Research Articles

Extending OSGi with Instant Messaging Communications and Peer to Peer Transfer Based on XMPP

In Recent years, the development of smart home applications based on OSGi framework has attracted increasing attention on the delivery of services on heterogeneous devices or platforms. In OSGi framework, bundles communicate with each other through service layer. However, the communication across OSGi frameworks for sharing services or exchanging information is rather limited and has no standard definition. In this paper, two types of services, instant messaging services and peer to peer transfer services, are introduced and implemented based on XMPP as a vehicle for extending OSGi framework. To be more specific, the scalability and mobility of OSGi bundles can be extended through the use of the proposed XMPP bundle with instant message communication and peer to peer transfer capabilities for collaborating and manipulating services provided by bundles located on remote OSGi platforms. A tour guide system is also implemented to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.

An evaluation method for dynamic combination among OSGi bundles based on service gateway capability

A user may use a software bundle provided by vendors to control consumer electronics (CEs) in a home network environment. Software was developed as a bundle composed of various components and registered to an OSGi service registry, thus, a user can select a suitable bundle and implement it in a service gateway. There's no need to consider hardware when using a single bundle, because this was handled by hardware, service gateway specifications. But using several bundles to implement a business process for simultaneous control of various CEs is a different matter. If hardware resource sharing was not considered in development, then quality of service (QoS) of the business process cannot be guaranteed. Thus, we need an evaluation method for a user-defined business process, to guarantee QoS in business process modeling. This paper suggests a representative evaluation algorithm by considering metadata about bundle distribution as evaluation items, such as method response time, component response time, memory space and CPU capacity. Also, this paper suggests a business process simulator. It enables constructions of simulations for the efficiency of evaluation items and methods. A user uses a simulator to select a suitable bundle for hardware and easily makes and verifies a suitable business process for their goals.

Collaboration of Set-Top Box and Residential Gateway Platforms

This paper introduces a means of enabling the collaboration of set-top box and residential gateway platforms. We propose an approach that can let MHP Xlets use OSGi resources and vice versa, i.e., OSGi bundles use MHP services in a simple and efficient way. In our approach, BundleContexts and XletContexts are passed to authorized Xlets and bundles, respectively. The required software components have been implemented, and an experiment has been conducted, which has verified that our proposal is practical.