Application Session Semantics for Mobile Ubiquitous Computing TR-UTEDGE-2005-002

Meeting the demand for dynamic ubiquitous computing applications requires programming abstractions and development tools tailored to this unique environment. This paper provides a programming framework tailored for ubiquitous computing applications that allows developers to express their applications’ needs in terms of interactive application sessions. These sessions are defined by a set of operations performed with remote resources. Our framework allows the developer to delegate responsibility for the construction and maintenance of the communication links necessary to support the application’s sessions to an underlying middleware. In this paper, we formalize a suite of session definitions necessary for general classes of dynamic ubiquitous computing applications. We also present a programming framework and middleware implementation that directly support the software development task. Finally, we demonstrate the simplicity and flexibility of our framework using a real-world application. Our approach promises to greatly simplify the programming of applications, enabling novice programmers to create expressive and adaptive ubiquitous computing applications.