Service composition provides the capability to automatically and dynamically combine services to produce new, value added services that can be offered to end users. This has been explored for relatively simple applications and applied to managing devices within a home area network. During this earlier work, two fundamental limitations have been discovered. The first limitation is that the composition process does not consider non-functional aspects. This is because, at the lowest level, whether or not two services may be composed is determined only by the compatibility of the data the first produces and the second consumes. This means that we cannot express such things as “the second service must be prepared to consume data at a rate of X” or “the combined cost of the two services must not exceed Y”. These are, in the broadest sense, Quality of Service (QoS) constraints that we would like to be met by the composition process. The second limitation is that the composition process does not currently consider linkage to services provided from outside the home. Thus, we cannot generate compositions between in-home devices and services provided outside the home. For example, we could not explicitly compose a service to view an on-demand movie on an HD TV where the source of the movie is outside the home. This is particularly problematic when the out-of-home service(s) have associated usage costs and/or require QoS constraints (e.g. to manage bandwidth use).

In this research, we will extend the existing service composition work to support QoS constraints within the home and to interface to external services from outside the home. A simple prototype will be constructed, a simulation based evaluation of its large-scale behaviour will be perfomed and recommendations will be provided. Additionally, the appropriateness of the DSL Forum’s TR-069 remote management capabilities will be assessed for deployment of QoS aware composed services.