ABSTRACT
The communication between two devices in a pervasive environment takes place at two levels: network-level communication using protocols such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Infrared and application-level protocols such as Bonjour, Jini, service location protocol (SLP) and universal plug and play (UPnP). This chapter deals with the service discovery and user interaction part of the problem. Service discovery is not only useful in infrastructure-based environment but it can also be used in an ad hoc communication system, where no fixed infrastructure is present but the nodes themselves can form the network on the fly. There are two possible approaches to carry out service discovery in a pervasive environment: peer-to-peer and centralized. The chapter focuses on the UPnP audio/video architecture which is quite comprehensive and has been implemented and used by a number of vendors worldwide. It describes how users can share contents between UPnP devices based on the standardized UPnP A/V architecture.
