Context Aware Middleware Architectures: Survey and Challenges

Abstract: Context aware applications, which can adapt their behaviors to changing environments, are attracting more and more attention. To simplify the complexity of developing applications, context aware middleware, which introduces context awareness into the traditional middleware, is highlighted to provide a homogeneous interface involving generic context management solutions. This paper provides a survey of state-of-the-art context aware middleware architectures proposed during the period from 2009 through 2015. First, a preliminary background, such as the principles of context, context awareness, context modelling, and context reasoning, is provided for a comprehensive understanding of context aware middleware. On this basis, an overview of eleven carefully selected middleware architectures is presented and their main features explained. Then, thorough comparisons and analysis of the presented middleware architectures are performed based on technical parameters including architectural style, context abstraction, context reasoning, scalability, fault tolerance, interoperability, service discovery, storage, security & privacy, context awareness level, and cloud-based big data analytics. The analysis shows that there is actually no context aware middleware architecture that complies with all requirements. Finally, challenges are pointed out as open issues for future work

17 - Nature-inspired Coordination for Complex Distributed Systems

Originating from closed parallel systems, coordination models and technologies gained in expressive power so to deal with open distributed systems. In particular, nature-inspired models of coordination emerged in the last decade as the most effective approaches to tackle the complexity of pervasive, intelligent, and self-* systems. In this talk we survey the most relevant nature-inspired coordination models, discuss the main open issues, and explore the trends for their future development

Survey on Quality of Observation within Sensor Web Systems

The Sensor Web vision refers to the addition of a middleware layer between sensors and applications. To bridge the gap between these two layers, Sensor Web systems must deal with heterogeneous sources, which produce heterogeneous observations of disparate quality. Managing such diversity at the application level can be complex and requires high levels of expertise from application developers. Moreover, as an information-centric system, any Sensor Web should provide support for Quality of Observation (QoO) requirements. In practice, however, only few Sensor Webs provide satisfying QoO support and are able to deliver high-quality observations to end consumers in a specific manner. This survey aims to study why and how observation quality should be addressed in Sensor Webs. It proposes three original contributions. First, it provides important insights into quality dimensions and proposes to use the QoO notion to deal with information quality within Sensor Webs. Second, it proposes a QoO-oriented review of 29 Sensor Web solutions developed between 2003 and 2016, as well as a custom taxonomy to characterise some of their features from a QoO perspective. Finally, it draws four major requirements required to build future adaptive and QoO-aware Sensor Web solutions

Middleware Solutions for the Internet of Things: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT), along with its wider variants including numerous technologies, things, and people: the Internet of Everything (IoE) and the Internet of Nano Things (IoNT), are considered as part of the Internet of the future and ubiquitous computing allowing the communication among billions of smart devices and objects, and have recently drawn a very significant research attention. In these approaches, there are varieties of heterogeneous devices empowered by new capabilities and interacting with each other to achieve specific applications in different domains. A middleware layer is therefore required to abstract the physical layer details of the smart IoT devices and ease the complex and challenging task of developing multiple backend applications. In this chapter, an overview of IoT technologies, architecture, and main applications is given first and then followed by a comprehensive survey on the most recently used and proposed middleware solutions designed for IoT networks. In addition, open issues in IoT middleware design and future works in the field of middleware development are highlighted

Building Blocks of the Internet of Things: State of the Art and Beyond

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