An SCA-based Approach for Social and Pervasive Communications in Home Environments

In home environments, the customization of applications according to inhabitant's information requires the integration of heterogenous event sources and services. To do that, the events have to be collected and processed, and the volatile services identified and used. The information collection and service access have to be done considering the identity of users in order to avoid unexpected behaviors in the customized applications or unauthorized accesses. However, although the event flow, service mobility and user identity are key issues in the customization of applications, existing solutions fail to deal with them in a simple and flexible way. Therefore, in this paper we propose to face these issues by combining the SCA (Service Component Architecture) standard, micro-blogging services and discovery technologies. In particular, we benefit from the SCA extensibility to introduce support for social communications enabling asynchronous event exchange (via Twitter), and for pervasive communications to deal with mobility (by means of standard discovery protocols such as UPnP). Furthermore, we exploit the intents from SCA in order to allow user identification in home environments. We bring the new communications and user identity support into the FraSCAti, a platform for SCA applications. We illustrate our work with a smart home scenario requiring the integration of heterogeneous technologies.