Engineering Spatial Services

Abstract

A new category of services based on data propagation among mobile devices is evolving. Traditionally, distributed applications are engineered on top of a mobile infrastructure in an ad hoc manner that does not conform to standard software engineering practices, such as modularization and reuse. Furthermore, current service-oriented approaches are not suited to this new generation of services that are dispersed on diffused Clouds, are subjected to dynamicity in the underlying mobile and computing infrastructures, and are required to handle time-related and space-related data. This chapter describes the notion of Spatial Services and delineates the design of these services and applications using self-organizing services that implement the active tuple space model inspired by chemical reactions. It explores the spontaneous self-composition of services, self-management of non-functional aspects, and separation of concerns to guarantee specified quality of service. The chapter presents an architectural style and describes execution models to implement such services.