Challenges to the Design of Mobile Middleware Systems

2003

Current advances in portable devices, wireless technologies, and distributed systems have created a mobile computing environment that is characterized by a large scale of dynamism. Diversities in network connectivity, platform capability, and resource availability can significantly affect the application performance. Traditional middleware systems, like CORBA and DCOM, have achieved great success in dealing with the heterogeneity in the underlying hardware and software platforms, offering portability, and facilitating development of distributed applications. However, they are not prepared to offer proper support for addressing the dynamic aspects of mobile systems. Modern distributed applications need a middleware that is capable of adapting to environment changes and that supports the required level of quality of service. This paper represents the experience of several research projects related to next generation middleware systems. We first define middleware and indicate the major challenges in mobile computing systems. We then take a broader perspective and try to identify the main requirements for mobile middleware systems. Following this, we review the different categories of mobile middleware technologies and show their strength and weakness. We finally present a simples discussion on the surveyed work and provide a number of observations about the remaining issues.

Mobile Networks and Applications, 2011

The most visible technology advance in the last decade is arguably the popular uses of wireless mobile handsets such as cellular phones. These devices are not just for phone calls, but also for the Internet access and management of mobile data. Many of them are equipped with positioning systems such as GPS, creating significant commercial opportunities for a range of new applications such as location-based services. Indeed, despite the recent economic downturn, the mobile computing industry continues to boom.

2001

Advances in wireless networking technology over the previous decade generated a new computing paradigm known as mobile computing, defined by users carrying portable devices that access shared infrastructures independent of their physical location; this allows flexible communication between people and continuous access to networked services [Forman & Zahorjan, 94].

Recently mobile devices became powerful enough to support outstanding applications envisioned for ubiquitous and pervasive computing. In these environments applications are usually built on top of a middleware in order to enable service reuse on different levels. Existing middleware approaches, however, aim at either operation in the network infrastructure or are built for specific purposes. In this paper an approach for structuring services and their management into several well defined layers is introduced and their requirements are discussed in detail.

2003

Abstract. Middleware layers placed between user clients and application servers have been used to perform a variety of functions to support the vision of nomadic computing across varying platforms. In previous work we have used middleware to perform a new capability, application session handoff, using a single Middleware Server to provide all functionality. However, to improve the scalability of our architecture, we have designed an efficient distributed Middleware Service layer that properly maintains application session handoff semantics while being able to service a large number of clients. We show that this service layer improves the scalability of general client-to-application server interaction as well as the specific case of application session handoff. We detail protocols involved in performing handoff and analyse an implementation of the architecture that supports the use of a real medical teaching tool. From experimental results it can be seen that our Middleware Service e...

2012

With the recent advancements in mobile technology and wireless communication like Bluetooth connectivity and Wi-Fi, accessing web services from mobile devices has become a focal point of research. Due to limitation of resource capabilities in mobile devices, however they are not always capable of consuming web services or web applications that are available on the Internet. This paper presents a middleware-based architecture that could be integrated into GSM network for discovery and invocation of Web Services from heterogeneous mobile devices. Our proposed middleware detects a new mobile device when it enters in its coverage area, authenticates it and then advertises the available services. The mobile device can then invoke any of the discovered services dynamically. This paper shows how the middleware makes different sorts of connection like Bluetooth connection with Bluetooth-enabled device, socket connection with Wi-Fi-enabled device and GPRS connection with a device when it is ...

With the recent advancements in mobile technology and wireless communication like Bluetooth connectivity and Wi-Fi, accessing web services from mobile devices has become a focal point of research. Due to limitation of resource capabilities in mobile devices, however they are not always capable of consuming web services or web applications that are available on the Internet. This paper presents a middleware-based architecture that could be integrated into GSM network for discovery and invocation of Web Services from heterogeneous mobile devices. Our proposed middleware detects a new mobile device when it enters in its coverage area, authenticates it and then advertises the available services. The mobile device can then invoke any of the discovered services dynamically. This paper shows how the middleware makes different sorts of connection like Bluetooth connection with Bluetooth-enabled device, socket connection with Wi-Fi-enabled device and GPRS connection with a device when it is neither in the Bluetooth nor the Wi-Fi coverage area of the middleware and then pushes the required client application needed to invoke the required service onto the mobile device.

… on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops, 2003. …, 2003

World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, International Journal of Computer, Electrical, Automation, Control and Information Engineering, 2014

Cloud computing (CC) and mobile cloud computing (MCC) have advanced rapidly the last few years. Today, MCC undergoes fast improvement and progress in terms of hardware (memory, embedded sensors, power consumption, touch screen, etc.) software (more and more sophisticated mobile applications) and transmission (higher data transmission rates achieved with different technologies such as 3Gs). This paper presents a review on the concept of CC and MCC. Then, it discusses what has been done regarding middleware in cloud and mobile cloud computing. Later, it shows the architecture of our proposed middleware along with its functionalities which will be provided to mobile clients in order to overcome the well known problems (such as low battery power, slow CPU speed and little memory...). Keywords—Context-aware, cloud computing, middleware, mobile cloud.

IASTED International …, 2004

With wireless communications and mobile hand-held de-vices becoming a reality, new applications where users can have access to information anytime, anywhere are made possible. To design a middleware-based platform for applications such as ...