Design And Implementation Of The Heterogeneous Device Interoperability Protocol In Pervasive Environment

In pervasive computing environment, intelligent heterogeneous devices, (such as cellphone, netbook and PDA) are capable of handling more complex interface information, so that the expression forms of users'interface are increasingly diversified, that is to say the devices can fulfill interaction with the users through the means like interactive graphics, audio and text. With the development of 3G mobile communication technology, the requirement of information interaction between the users possessing different kinds of devices is getting increasingly urgent. But the diversity of the interface makes it impossible that the same information object in different devices can simply fulfill the interaction through the same interactive approach. The heterogeneity of the interactive approach makes interactive semantic communication and expression in different devices more complex, resulting in difficulties in the interoperability of heterogeneous devices.In this paper, interactive semantics means the contents of the information that can be seen can controlled by the users. The contents are the tacit meaning of the interface elements, so they do not change with the change of interface form at different interfaces. It is just the feature of invariance of the information contents that makes interoperability between heterogeneous devices possible. At present, there are already many methods of describing such standard interface elements as buttons, menus, text boxes, and the methods have been applied to the heterogeneous device environment, but they failed to notice the semantic interaction at main window interface which is the most difficult problem to deal with, so the interoperability problem cannot be really solved.Directing at the problem mentioned above, this paper layouts a device-independent interactive semantics transmission protocol—GISTP. Based on XML, the protocol is for a unified description of the interactive information on the main window interface, and the information is transmitted through communication networks to the interoperating devices, then the information will be interpreted by the GISTP interpreter of the devices, extracting the interactive semantics in the main window and presenting it at the interface through the expression forms which meet the hardware and software features of the devices, so that the interoperability of heterogeneous devices is achieved. The study also layouts and implements GISTP interpreter prototype in different devices, and develops an interface toolkit which applies GISTP protocol to support application developers easily build programs based on GISTP. And finally the author elaborates the development process of GISTP program through a case study, and illustrates the availability and effectivity of the protocol.The research of this paper was supported by the National High-Tech Research and Development Program of China (863 Program) (No.2006AA01Z328), the Open Foundation of State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. SYSKF0704), the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant (No. 60873095), and the Science Research Laboratory Foundation of Graduate Student, Northwest University (No.09YSY30).