Adaptive Preference Specifications for Application Sessions TR-UTEDGE-2006-006

In ubiquitous computing applications, mobile participants must be empowered to opportunistically connect to services available in their local environments. Our previous work has elucidated a model for allowing applications to specify the functional properties of the services to which they need to connect. Our framework then connects applications to dynamic resources through the use of a novel suite of application sessions. In this paper, we revisit this framework to devise a mechanism for applications to specify preferences for one service provider over another. In this investigation, we argue that these preferences are actually provided by a set of session participants: the application itself, the service provider, and, more surprisingly, the network that connects the application and the provider. We develop a framework for each of these parties to specify preferences among various allowable connections. We demonstrate not only what kinds of properties can be expressed in our framework but also implementation paths for integrating them into the communication and application support infrastructure.