Contextual entity networking : Enable Dynamic and Flexible Interaction between Heterogeneous Entities in Support of Ambient Intelligent Services

Sammanfattning: Ambient intelligent (AmI) service acquires, comprehends, and reacts to contextual information from user immersed surroundings to address human needs based on the interaction between AmI entities. Therefore, it is important to enable flexible and dynamic interaction between these AmI entities and to keep up with the changing user immersed surroundings. Previous research studies have proposed many techniques to support the interactions between entities. However, there are still many limits that hinder dynamic and flexible entity interactions. For example, most information exchanged between entities does not distinguish context relevance between each other so that entities are usually bothered by irrelevant information. Moreover, tight cooperation between sensors and actuators are not calibrated well; therefore, entity interaction equals sensor interaction.To deal with the limitations and support dynamic and flexible entity interaction, this thesis proposes an approach called contextual entity networking (CEN) to enable dynamic and flexible contextual interaction between AmI entities. Using CEN, contextual entity interaction is set upon a virtual world formed by entity mirrors and their service logics, which are enabled to explore the potentially related entities and enable the tight logical cooperation between entities from different spaces. Moreover, the information is shared only with the contextual related AmI entities.With the proposed technique, context messages are shared with the logically related entities, and interactions between entities obey the service logics that enable all the entities to work towards the same goal. Due to the decoupled and distributed infrastructure, entities can freely interact with any other entities in the platform, which does not impact the final consequence of context sharing. These features enhance the dynamicity and flexibility of interactions and enable the entity interactions to easily suit the changing user immersed surroundings.