Prottoy Middleware Platform for Smart Object Systems

This paper presents a middleware platform, Prottoy for the development of smart object systems. A smart object has some specific characteristics e.g., augmentation variation, perceptual feedback provision, push-pull model, etc. In addition a smart object could be stand-alone, co-operative or associated with an external application. Generic pervasive middlewares have no clean support for accommodating all these characteristics of smart objects. Prottoy is designed by carefully observing the characteristics of smart objects and it has taken a core-cloud approach to represent them digitally. A smart object’s common functional features are combined together as a generic core and a collection of supplementary service profiles represents the cloud that can be plugged-in atop the core. Application developers are offered unified interfaces to interact bi-directionally (senseactuate) with the underlying smart objects isolating access issues completely regardless of the smart objects' types and properties. Prottoy's hybrid architecture allows a smart object to be stand-alone, co-operative or a part of an application. The benefit of our approach is twofold. Firstly, the core-cloud artefact framework provides a lucid representation of smart object that accommodates its specific features leading to a generic smart object model. Secondly, Prottoy allows rapid development of smart object systems by providing unified interfaces with high-level abstractions. In this paper, we discuss the background, technical details and the qualitative evaluation of Prottoy.