Resolving feature convolution in middleware systems

Middleware provides simplicity and uniformity for the development of distributed applications. However, the modularity of the architecture of middleware is starting to disintegrate and to become complicated due to the interaction of too many orthogonal concerns imposed from a wide range of application requirements. This is not due to bad design but rather due to the limitations of the conventional architectural decomposition methodologies. We introduce the principles of horizontal decomposition (HD) which addresses this problem with a mixed-paradigm middleware architecture. HD provides guidance for the use of conventional decomposition methods to implement the core functionalities of middleware and the use of aspect orientation to address its orthogonal properties. Our evaluation of the horizontal decomposition principles focuses on refactoring major middleware functionalities into aspects in order to modularize and isolate them from the core architecture. New versions of the middleware platform can be created through combining the core and the flexible selection of middleware aspects such as IDL data types, the oneway invocation style, the dynamic messaging style, and additional character encoding schemes. As a result, the primary functionality of the middleware is supported with a much simpler architecture and enhanced performance. Moreover, customization and configuration of the middleware for a wide-range of requirements becomes possible

Toward a Behavioral Decomposition for Context-awareness and Continuity of Services

International audienceMany adaptative context-aware middleware exist and most of them rely on so-called vertical architectures that offer a functional decomposition for contextawareness. This architecture has a weak point: it does not allow the system handling both dynamics of the changing environment and applications. To avoid this, we propose an approach for context-awareness based on a behavioral decomposition, and because each behavior must complete all functionalities necessary for contextawareness, we introduce an hybrid decomposition. It consists in a functional decomposition into a behavioral decomposition. This approach derives benefits from both decomposition, first allowing to handle environment and application's dynamics, second introducing reusability and modularity into behaviors

Customizing Component Middleware for Distributed Real-Time Systems with Aperiodic and Periodic Tasks

Many distributed real-time applications must handle mixed aperiodic and periodic tasks with diverse requirements. However, existing middleware lacks flexible configuration mechanisms needed to manage end-to-end timing easily for a wide range of different applications with both aperiodic and periodic tasks. The primary contribution of this work is the design, implementation and performance evaluation of the first configurable component middleware services for admission control and load balancing of aperiodic and periodic tasks in distributed real-time systems. Empirical results demonstrate the need for, and the effectiveness of, our configurable component middleware approach in supporting different applications with aperiodic and periodic tasks

Edicts: implementing features with flexible binding times

ManuscriptIn a software product line, the binding time of a feature is the time at which one decides to include or exclude a feature from a product. Typical binding site implementations are intended to support a single binding time only, e.g., compile time or run time. Sometimes, however, a product line must support features with variable binding times. For instance, a product line may need to include both embedded system configurations, in which features are selected and optimized early, and desktop configurations, in which client programs choose features on demand. We present a new technique for implementing the binding sites of features that require flexible binding times. Our technique combines design patterns and aspect-oriented programming: a pattern encapsulates the variation point, and targeted aspects-called edicts-set the binding times of the pattern participants. We describe our approach and demonstrate its usefulness by creating a middleware product line capable of serving the desktop and embedded domains. Our product line is based on JacORB, a middleware platform with many dynamically configurable features. By using edicts to select features at compile time, we create a version of JacORB more suited to resource-constrained environments. By configuring four JacORB subsystems via edicts, we achieve a 32.2% reduction in code size. Our examples show that our technique effectively modularizes binding-time concerns, supporting both compile-time optimization and run-time flexibility as needed

Roadmap Analysis of Protein-Protein Interactions. Master\u27s Thesis, August 2007

The ability to effectively model the interaction between proteins is an important and open problem. In molecular biology it is well accepted that from sequence arises form and from form arises function but relating structure to function remains a challenge. The function of a given protein is defined by its interactions. Likewise a malfunction or a change in protein-protein interactions is a hallmark of many diseases. Many researchers are studying the mechanisms of protein-protein interactions and one of the overarching goals of the community is to predict whether two proteins will bind, and if so what the final conformation will be. Attention is seldom paid to the association pathways that allow two proteins to bind. Evidence has shown that the information in the association pathways can play a vital role in understanding the interaction itself. This thesis presents a novel and scalable approach to computing association pathways between two proteins using the Probabilistic Roadmap (PRM) framework. We will discuss the challenges in extending PRM to the domain of protein-protein interactions such as performing structural mappings in a reduced space of flexibility, and sampling high dimensional conformation spaces. We will present analysis of individual association pathways as well as methods for estimating collective properties of the energy landscape. Our results indicate that these methods can discriminate between true and false protein binding interfaces. Finally, we will present condensing methods such as pathway clustering and visualization using dimensionality reduction that can be be applied to create compact representations of the interaction space

Universal Mobile Service Execution Framework for Device-To-Device Collaborations

There are high demands of effective and high-performance of collaborations between mobile devices in the places where traditional Internet connections are unavailable, unreliable, or significantly overburdened, such as on a battlefield, disaster zones, isolated rural areas, or crowded public venues. To enable collaboration among the devices in opportunistic networks, code offloading and Remote Method Invocation are the two major mechanisms to ensure code portions of applications are successfully transmitted to and executed on the remote platforms. Although these domains are highly enjoyed in research for a decade, the limitations of multi-device connectivity, system error handling or cross platform compatibility prohibit these technologies from being broadly applied in the mobile industry. To address the above problems, we designed and developed UMSEF - an Universal Mobile Service Execution Framework, which is an innovative and radical approach for mobile computing in opportunistic networks. Our solution is built as a component-based mobile middleware architecture that is flexible and adaptive with multiple network topologies, tolerant for network errors and compatible for multiple platforms. We provided an effective algorithm to estimate the resource availability of a device for higher performance and energy consumption and a novel platform for mobile remote method invocation based on declarative annotations over multi-group device networks. The experiments in reality exposes our approach not only achieve the better performance and energy consumption, but can be extended to large-scaled ubiquitous or IoT systems