An SCA-Based Middleware Platform for Mobile Devices

International audienceIn pervasive environments, users can potentially access a variety of services through their mobile devices. However, in order to use the new services, we need to adapt the functionality of these devices. To achieve it, we propose to load a bootstrap into them that is able to communicate with the services. However this bootstrap has to be adapted due to the diversity of services offered in the environment, which are heterogeneous regarding aspects such as communication and discovery. Our bootstrap has two layers: the application layer and the middleware layer. This paper focuses in the middleware layer. We propose an architecture based on the Service Component Architecture (SCA). The architecture eases the reconguration of the components at runtime to support different communication mechanisms and service discovery protocols. Besides, using SCA, we can add new functionality to the middleware platform that can be provided by remote applications (SCA or not)

Enabling Context-Aware Web Services: A Middleware Approach for Ubiquitous Environments

In ubiquitous environments, mobile applications should sense and react to environmental changes to provide a better user experience. In order to deal with these concerns, Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) provide a solution allowing applications to interact with the services available in their surroundings. In particular, context-aware Web Services can adapt their behavior considering the user context. However, the limited resources of mobile devices restrict the adaptation degree. Furthermore, the diverse nature of context information makes difficult its retrieval, processing and distribution. To tackle these challenges, we present the CAPPUCINO platform for executing context-aware Web Services in ubiquitous environments. In particular, in this chapter we focus on the middleware part that is built as an autonomic control loop that deals with dynamic adaptation. In this autonomic loop we use FraSCAti, an implementation of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) specification, as the execution kernel for Web Services. The context distribution is achieved with SPACES, a flexible solution based on REST (REpresentational State Transfer ) principles and benefiting from the COSMOS (COntext entitieS coMpositiOn and Sharing ) context manage- ment framework. The application of our platform is illustrated with a mobile commerce application scenario that combines context-aware Web Services and social networks

RESTful Service Development for Resource-constrained Environments

International audienceThe use of resource-constrained devices, such as smartphones, PDAs, Tablet PCs, and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is spreading rapidly in the business community and our daily life. Accessing services from such devices is very common in ubiquitous environments, but mechanisms to describe, implement and distribute these services remain a major challenge. Web services have been characterized as an efficient and widely-adopted approach to overcome heterogeneity, while this technology is still heavyweight for resource-constrained devices. The emergence of REST architectural style as a lightweight and simple interaction model has encouraged researchers to study the feasibility of exploiting REST principles to design and integrate services hosted on devices with limited capabilities. In this chapter, we discuss the state-of-the-art in applying REST concepts to develop Web services for WSNs and smartphones as two representative resource-constrained platforms, and then we provide a comprehensive survey of existing solutions in this area. In this context, we report on the DIGIHOME platform, a home monitoring middleware solution, which enables efficient service integration in ubiquitous environments using REST architectural style. In particular, we target our reference platforms for homemonitoring systems, namelyWSNs and smartphones, and report our experiments in applying the concept of Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) in order to provide resource-efficient RESTful distribution of Web services for those platforms

Integration of Heterogeneous Context Resources in Ubiquitous Environments

International audienceUbiquitous environments provide families of context-aware applications that are capable of exploiting the user mobility as well as the device variability. Typically, these applications retrieve context information from local and remote providers and react accordingly to the detected variations. However, this must be done by considering the heterogeneity of devices and protocols found in ubiquitous environments. Unfortunately, although the context integration represents a keystone of context-aware systems, existing approaches in the literature fail to integrate the diversity of context sources in a standard and flexible way. Therefore, in this paper, we overcome this challenge by introducing resource-oriented bindings into the SCA (Service Component Architecture) model. This new kind of bindings follows the REpresentational State Transfer (REST) principles and leverages the provision of context as RESTful resources. A smart home scenario that highlights challenges in terms of integration in ubiquitous environments motivates the use of our approach

A Guide to Documenting Software Design for Maximum Software Portability for Software Defined Radios

The use of software defined communications systems is growing incredibly fast. The field of software engineering as a discipline has not adequately addressed the subject of software portability which makes large and costly software development efforts less ready to port to future platforms. By understanding the causes of portability problems, they can either be avoided altogether in development or very well documented so that they are easier to overcome in future efforts. Literature, case studies, and surveys are used to collect opinions and information about large software programs where portability is a desirable characteristic in order to best establish the facts and way forward for future research efforts

Activity-Centric Computing Systems

• Activity-Centric Computing (ACC) addresses deep-rooted information management problems in traditional application centric computing by providing a unifying computational model for human goal-oriented ‘activity,’ cutting across system boundaries. • We provide a historical review of the motivation for and development of ACC systems, and highlight the need for broadening up this research topic to also include low-level system research and development. • ACC concepts and technology relate to many facets of computing; they are relevant for researchers working on new computing models and operating systems, as well as for application designers seeking to incorporate these technologies in domain-specific applications

Requirements of the SALTY project

This document is the first external deliverable of the SALTY project (Self-Adaptive very Large disTributed sYstems), funded by the ANR under contract ANR-09-SEGI-012. It is the result of task 1.1 of the Work Package (WP) 1 : Requirements and Architecture. Its objective is to identify and collect requirements from use cases that are going to be developed in WP 4 (Use cases and Validation). Based on the study and classification of the use cases, requirements against the envisaged framework are then determined and organized in features. These features will aim at guide and control the advances in all work packages of the project. As a start, features are classified, briefly described and related scenarios in the defined use cases are pinpointed. In the following tasks and deliverables, these features will facilitate design by assigning priorities to them and defining success criteria at a finer grain as the project progresses. This report, as the first external document, has no dependency to any other external documents and serves as a reference to future external documents. As it has been built from the use cases studies that have been synthesized in two internal documents of the project, extracts from the two documents are made available as appendices (cf. appen- dices B and C)

A Component-Based Approach for Securing Indoor Home Care Applications

eHealth systems have adopted recent advances on sensing technologies together with advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) in order to provide people-centered services that improve the quality of life of an increasingly elderly population. As these eHealth services are founded on the acquisition and processing of sensitive data (e.g., personal details, diagnosis, treatments and medical history), any security threat would damage the public's confidence in them. This paper proposes a solution for the design and runtime management of indoor eHealth applications with security requirements. The proposal allows applications definition customized to patient particularities, including the early detection of health deterioration and suitable reaction (events) as well as security needs. At runtime, security support is twofold. A secured component-based platform supervises applications execution and provides events management, whilst the security of the communications among application components is also guaranteed. Additionally, the proposed event management scheme adopts the fog computing paradigm to enable local event related data storage and processing, thus saving communication bandwidth when communicating with the cloud. As a proof of concept, this proposal has been validated through the monitoring of the health status in diabetic patients at a nursing home.This work was financed under project DPI2015-68602-R (MINECO/FEDER, UE), UPV/EHU under project PPG17/56 and GV/EJ under recognized research group IT914-16

Context-Aware Middleware: An overview

Paper published in "Revista Paradigma" from Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá- ColombiaNational audienceIn this paper we give an overview of context-aware middleware plat- forms. They are characterized in terms of properties such as communication, con- text management and adaptation. We present a description of different platforms and their properties

Aspects of Assembly and Cascaded Aspects of Assembly: Logical and Temporal Properties

Highly dynamic computing environments, like ubiquitous and pervasive computing environments, require frequent adaptation of applications. This has to be done in a timely fashion, and the adaptation process must be as fast as possible and mastered. Moreover the adaptation process has to ensure a consistent result when finished whereas adaptations to be implemented cannot be anticipated at design time. In this paper we present our mechanism for self-adaptation based on the aspect oriented programming paradigm called Aspect of Assembly (AAs). Using AAs: (1) the adaptations process is fast and its duration is mastered; (2) adaptations' entities are independent of each other thanks to the weaver logical merging mechanism; and (3) the high variability of the software infrastructure can be managed using a mono or multi-cycle weaving approach.Comment: 14 pages, published in International Journal of Computer Science, Volume 8, issue 4, Jul 2011, ISSN 1694-081