DEAPspace - Transient ad hoc networking of pervasive devices

The rapid spreading of mobile computerized devices marks the beginning of a new computing paradigm characterized by ad hoc networking and spontaneous interaction, taking place transparently to the human user. The DEAPspace project described in this gaper aims at providing a framework for interconnecting pervasive devices over a wireless medium. It supports the development of new proximity-based collective distributed applications. In this paper we discuss the motivation of the project and describe possible new application scenarios from which requirements for both the supporting framework and the underlying wireless medium are derived. Central research issues such as a new push-model-based approach to fast and resource efficient service discovery, and encoding and match-making of compact service descriptions, are elaborated in more detail. The paper also describes some related work and concludes with a critical review of existing wireless communication technologies, followed by a description of the current state of our project and an outlook on future research directions. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.