A Middleware Platform For Pervasive Environment

The basic goal of pervasive computing is to develop technologies that allow smart devices to automatically adapt to changing environments and contexts, making the environment largely imperceptible to the user. One big barrier to the wide spread development of pervasive computing applications lies in the increased complexity of the programming task. There is a big gap between high-level application requirements, and low-level complex system organization and operations. Middleware can help bridge the gap — supporting rapid development and deployment of applications by domain experts with minimal programming expertise. However, pervasive computing poses new challenges to middleware research. Publish/Subscribe (pub/sub) middleware has many advantages when implementing systems for spontaneous, ad-hoc, pervasive applications. This paper describes REBECA architecture and the REBECA notification service. To efficiently support mobility, it is necessary to adequately deal with the uncertainty introduced by client movement. This paper sketches how this is done in the existing pub/sub middleware with REBECA and shows how to increase the efficiency of logical mobility by adapting the implementation of physical mobility.