Title: Semantic service substitution in pervasive environments

Authors: Noha Ibrahim; Frédéric Le Mouël; Stéphane Frénot

Addresses: University of Grenoble, LIG – Grenoble Informatics Laboratory, F-38402 St. Martin d'Heres, Grenoble, France ' University of Lyon, INSA-Lyon, INRIA CITI Lab, F-69621 Villeurbanne, France ' University of Lyon, INSA-Lyon, INRIA CITI Lab, F-69621 Villeurbanne, France

Abstract: A computing infrastructure where 'everything is a service' offers many new system and application possibilities. Among the main challenges, however, is the issue of service substitution for the application execution in such heterogeneous environments. An application would like to continue to execute even when a service disappears, or it would like to benefit from the environment by using better services with better QoS when possible. In this article, we define a generic service model and describe the equivalence relations between services considering the functionalities they propose and their non-functional QoS properties. We define semantic equivalence relations between services and equivalence degree between non-functional QoS properties. Using these relations we propose semantic substitution mechanisms upon the appearance and disappearance of services that fit the application needs in a pervasive environment. We developed a prototype as a proof of concept and evaluated its efficiency over a real use case.

Keywords: service-oriented architecture; SOA; service substitution; semantic matching; semantic distance; quality of service; QoS; z-score; equivalence relations; generic service model; services; pervasive computing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSEM.2014.068244

International Journal of Services, Economics and Management, 2014 Vol.6 No.4, pp.283 - 309

Received: 02 Nov 2013
Accepted: 02 Nov 2013
Published online: 08 Apr 2015 *

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