Middleware providing dynamic group communication facility for cellular phone applications

In this paper, we propose a middleware library for efficiently developing distributed cooperative applications consisting of a large number of cellular phone users. Our middleware provides: (1) a dynamic group formation mechanism depending on users´ locations and preferred subjects; and (2) a group communication mechanism called multiway synchronization for multicasting, synchronization and mutual exclusion. Most of Java executors on cellular phones do not support direct communication among user programs. Usable resources are also restricted. Therefore, in our middleware, most of user programs are executed on their servers as agents. Group communication is implemented as inter-process communication on the server, and only the user-interface parts are executed on the cellular phones.