This paperintroduces the notion of “universalinteraction,” allowing a device to adapt its functionality to exploit services it discovers as it moves into a new environment. Users wish to invoke services — such as controlling the lights, printing locally, or reconfiguring the location of DNS servers — from their mobile devices. But a priori standardizationof interfaces and methods forservice invocation is infeasible. Thus,the challenge is to develop a new service architecture that supports heterogeneity in client devices and controlled objects, and which makes minimal assumptions about standard interfaces and control protocols. There are five components to a comprehensive solution to this problem: 1) allowing device mobility, 2) augmenting controllable objects to makethem network-accessible, 3) building an underlying discovery architecture, 4) mapping between exported object interfaces and client device controls, and 5) building complex behaviors from underlying composable ob...
Todd D. Hodes, Randy H. Katz, Edouard Servan-Schre