A feature model of an aspect-oriented middleware family for pervasive systems

Pervasive applications will be naturally integrated as part of our environment. On the one hand, they will be deployed into a diversity of small devices and appliances, and on the other hand, they must be aware of highly changing execution contexts. Therefore pervasive computing requires the definition of advance mechanisms that support, (1) the deployment of pervasive applications through various devices with different capacities, and (2) the runtime reconfiguration for dealing with context changes. A software product line approach would be very useful to express the different requirements of devices in terms of commonalities and variabilities of a middleware platforms family. A feature model for pervasive applications will help both to deploy various configurations of the middleware tailored to each device, and to support the dynamic reconfiguration according to context. But, several crosscutting variable features and dependencies between features are commonly found in pervasive computing, (e.g. security, context-awareness, fault-tolerance, etc.). To address this problem we propose a family of aspect-oriented middleware platforms, able to deal with the high dynamic issue of pervasive systems. In this paper we will focus on the feature model definition and we also outline its mapping to a dynamic aspect-oriented middleware platform.