A context-aware multimedia service scheduling framework in smart homes

Many pervasive services are embedded in smart homes. It is a great challenge to schedule these services due to the heterogeneity and the mobility of devices. In this article, we elaborate a context-aware service scheduling framework (CASSF), which discovers available services hosted on those heterogeneous and mobile devices, selects suitable services that meet task requirements (TR) and ultimately enhances user experience with content adaptation. Contributions of this article are in three folds. First, the device ontology is designed to describe device features including built-in services, which benefits the knowledge sharing and facilitates the service discovery; second, a context-aware service selection mechanism is proposed, in which available services and contexts including user situations, TR, device capabilities, etc. are taken into consideration. Furthermore, due to the heterogeneity and the diversity of devices, the content adaptation is introduced in the framework to improve user satisfaction. Based on the CASSF, a multimedia prompting system is implemented to assist the elderly with intelligent services, and the evaluation of the proposed framework is performed in term of the execution time. The experimental results showed the framework is feasible and effective.