UPnP, Jini and Salutation - A look at some popular coordination frameworks for future networked devices.
With the world of specialized information appliances poised to take over the technology landscape in the coming years, coordination between devices has become a serious research issue. A number of architectures addressing mobile and specialized devices have emerged recently. These architectures are essentially coordination frameworks that propose certain ways and means of device interaction with the ultimate aim of simple, seamless and scaleable device inter-operability.
Among the well known contenders, Universal Plug and Play (www.upnp.org) , Jini (www.jini.org) and Salutation (www.salutation.org) architectures are prominent, coming primarily from the industry. There is also a great amount of active research happening "silently" in the academic world. Whichever gets to become standard(s), it will be useful to understand what these frameworks are all about.
It is not easy for coordination frameworks to have much of a say on data communication protocols between devices. This is because devices can be very specialized, following umpteen different data protocols. It will be tough for a framework to adapt them all into a standard. However, a coordination framework can make devices become aware of one another in sufficient detail. The intelligence within a device can decide whether it can or should talk to another device and also what protocol(s) to use. The framework can also provide protocol definitions in an attempt of standardization.
