Distributed Middleware Services Composition and Synthesis Technology

The highly distributed and resource constrained nature of computing in Networked Embedded Systems necessitates an application specific middleware—a kind of distributed operating system that provides global services for the application. We propose to automatically synthesize the middleware from abstract, platform-independent algorithm models. The modeling language captures the temporal and computational aspects of the distributed algorithms in a programming language-independent and platform-neutral way. It supports the specification, composition and verification of middleware components, and allows the integration of existing platform-specific components. We have implemented a proof-of-concept prototype modeling environment, and used it to model and generate the middleware for a structural vibration damping application running on an I/O automata-based Java simulator, and for a cooperative acoustic tracking application running on TinyOS. The proposed formalism allows the creation of a platform-independent library of middleware services that can be used to build and synthesize various application-specific middleware instances.