COMMPC - Component Based Middleware for Pervasive Computing

Portable devices like laptops, palm tops, PDAs or mobile phones have become widespread. Similarly network functionality like GSM, Bluetooth or WLAN has become a standard. Nevertheless, not many applications take mobility into account. An application and its communication functions are tightly coupled and the applications assume that network behavior does not change during the application use. Here in this paper we propose and implement a new component based lightweight middleware based on Service Component Architecture (SCA) consisting of a small foot-print core layer and a modularized pluggable infrastructure. The SCA eases the reconfiguration of the components at runtime to support different communication mechanisms and service discovery protocols. Besides using SCA, new functionalities can be added to the middleware platform that can be provided by remote applications. The architecture presented in this paper is suitable for mobile devices and extensible to make use of abstractions to conquer heterogeneity in mobile devices. The prototype of the architecture is implemented using fractal tools and tested on Nokia mobile phones and laptops. A minimum configuration of the platform can be executed on embedded systems. Resource-rich execution environment are supported by the extensibility of the middleware. The resulting core component is about 250Kbytes in size.