A rule based data monitoring middleware for mobile applications

In this article we look at the scenario of mobile nodes, e.g. cars, which are connected to a back-end system and an application running on the mobile back-end system which wants to monitor data of the mobile nodes, e.g. the position data of the cars. There are many options to realize such an application, but we have to take care of the costs and performance of the application, since a cost-intensive mobile link is used. We present a middleware architecture solving the problem described, and an implementation of this rule based data monitoring middleware by minimizing the communication frequency over the mobile link. The implementation is based on the service oriented architecture (SOA), a middleware framework which tries to simplify as much as possible the software architecture of distributed applications. The realization of our middleware and exemplary application uses Web service technologies to be platform and vendor independent. Finally, the rule based middleware is evaluated in respect of the application delay and the application communication costs.