XDN: Cross-Device Framework for Custom Notifications Management

With the increase of connected devices and online services, and recently IoT devices, the number of notifications received by every person is growing. The importance of notifications, as they become part of people’s lives, often depends on various factors that can differently influence the reaction and the disruption of recipients. For this reason, the generation and the distribution of notifications has been gaining importance in the design of new applications, services, and smart devices. Nowadays, developers have not yet fully exploited all the advantages that the availability of multiple devices could bring in the customization and the distribution of notifications, e.g., exploiting a cross-device approach. This paper presents XDN (Cross Device Notification), a framework to assist developers in creating cross-device notifications by scripting. The XDN architecture includes: a library to enable developers to design personalized notifications to be distributed among ad-hoc networks of IoT/mobile devices; a GUI to assist developers in implementing and testing (through a simulator) notification strategies; a server-side runtime environment; and an XDN IoT/mobile library for device support. We discuss the requirements for cross device notification systems, and we present the features of the XDN framework, in particular from the point of view of developer advantages, validated through different scenarios.