The architecture of a conventional smart home is usually server-centric and thus causes many problems. Mobile devices and dynamic services affect a dynamically changing environment, which can result in very difficult interaction. In addition, how to provide services efficiently and appropriately is always an important issue for a smart home. To solve the problems caused by traditional architectures, to deal with the dynamic environment, and to provide appropriate services, we propose a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for smart-home environments, based on Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) and mobile-agent (MA) technology. This architecture is a peer-to-peer (P2P) model based on multiple OSGi platforms, in which service-oriented mechanisms are used for system components to interact with one another, and MA technology is applied to augment the interaction mechanisms

We can perceive the advent of smart living spaces attributed to the fast emerging of IoT (Internet of Things) technologies. By combining with the blockchain technology, many innovative business models can be brought into reality. This paper aims to report our recent progress in investigating the architectural issues for realizing blockchain-driven IoT services. In particular, we present and discuss four typical architectural styles for such services. A preliminary evaluation against different styles is also provided to compare the given styles.

Context-awareness has become a distinguishing feature of Ubiquitous systems. Contrary to desktop and Web applications, Ubiquitous applications gather environmental context and provide services without user intervention. In this paper, we propose a message- oriented application model that is capable of modeling both user and system initiative interaction paradigms by N, Ramakrishan, et al (2002). Systems designed based on this model are inherently loosely-coupled and scalable. Results of this research include a systematic development procedure and its supporting middleware. We show the feasibility of this model by constructing several Ubiquitous applications for two dissimilar demo sites, and discuss experiences when adopting this model.

Reliability is one of the key challenges of pervasive systems. Numerous message-oriented architectures and service discovery protocols have been proposed to support service management in pervasive systems. Nevertheless, few researches have been done to improve the reliability of pervasive systems. This paper attempts to propose a reliable service management framework by formally defining a message-oriented service application model and protocols that facilitate autonomous composition, failure detection, and recovery of services. Proposed approaches are realized by constructing a developer's toolkit that enables rapid-prototyping of services. We evaluate the proposed approach by first proving the reliability property and then conducting experiments on recovery rate and performance. The results show that the recovery rate can be greatly improved by the proposed approach. Furthermore, the services developed by using the proposed approach are capable of integrating heterogeneous software/hardware, and can be deployed in dissimilar sites with little efforts.

A Pervasive-computing-enriched smart home environment, which contains many embedded and tiny intelligent devices and sensors coordinated by service management mechanisms, is capable of anticipating intentions of occupants and providing appropriate services accordingly. Although there are a wealth of research achievements in recent years, the degree of market acceptance is still low. The main reason is that most of the devices and services in such environments depend on particular platform or technology, making it hard to develop an application by composing the devices or services. Meanwhile, the concept of Web of Things (WoT) is becoming popular recently. Based on WoT, the developers can build applications based on popular web tools or technologies. Consequently, the objective of this paper is to propose a set of novel WoT-driven plug-and-play service management schemes for a smart home called Resource-Oriented Service Administration (ROSA). We have implemented an application prototype, and experiments are performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The results of this research can be a foundation for realizing the vision of “end user programmable smart environments”.