Edinburgh Napier University

  Ubiquitous Computing promises to enrich our everyday lives by enabling the environment to be enhanced via computational elements. These elements are designed to augment and support our lives, thus allowing us to perform our tasks and goals. The main facet of Ubiquitous Computing is that computational devices are embedded in the environment, and interact with users and themselves to provide novel and unique applications. Ubiquitous Computing requires an underlying architecture that helps to promote and control the dynamic properties and structures that the applications require. In this thesis, the Networking package of Communicating Sequential Processes for Java (JCSP) is examined to analyse its suitability as the underlying architecture for Ubiquitous Computing. The reason to use JCSP Networking as a case study is that one of the proposed models for Ubiquitous Computing, the ?-Calculus, has the potential to have its abstractions implemented within JCSP Networking. This thesis examines some of the underlying properties of JCSP Networking and examines them within the context of Ubiquitous Computing. There is also an examination into the possibility of implementing the mobility constructs of the ?-Calculus and similar mobility models within JCSP Networking. It has been found that some of the inherent properties of Java and JCSP Networking do cause limitations, and hence a generalisation of the architecture has been made that should provide greater suitability of the ideas behind JCSP Networking to support Ubiquitous Computing. The generalisation has resulted in the creation of a verified communication protocol that can be applied to any Communicating Process Architecture.