Investigating Adapter Technology for Dynamic Device Discovery

2:00pm Friday April 21, 2000
Lecture Hall III, Administration Building

My colleagues and I are investigating the use of Jini in wireless adapters for "dumb" devices. In fact, we built two versions of a wireless Jini-based adapter. We used one adapter to demonstrate Jini-based discovery of a wireless remote projector control service and an image projection service. We found that Jini works; however, the combination of Jini, Java, and Remote Method Invocation require substantial memory, disk, and processing resources. Also, deploying and administering Jini proved quite complex in hetergeneous environments. My talk discusses these findings in light of Jini's potential for use in 8-bit and 16-bit microcontrollers. I also describe our future plans to: (1) conduct a functional study of nine discovery and configuration technologies and protocols, (2) design, implement, and evaluate a lightweight dynamic discovery and configuration system, and (3) develop software tools for discovering, testing, measuring, and diagnosing dynamically deployed devices and services.