Customizing Message-Oriented Mobile Middleware

Several Message-Oriented Middleware (MOM) for mobile platforms are available, each with their own proprietary functionality to attend specific application scenarios. At present, a significant limitation of such platforms is that they typically support only a single, pre-defined, messaging style (e.g., publish/subscribe). This restriction limits the scope of platforms in that they cannot easily accommodate, or easily be extended to accommodate, richer or more specialized forms of interaction. Based on these observations, this paper presents a customizable middleware platform that abstracts basic messaging features adapted for the constraints of mobility, and admits specific specializations and extensions. Its feasibility is demonstrated by deriving implementations for five distinct messaging styles. The evaluation results show that most part of the code is common among messaging styles, and thus the customization process exploited is an effective approach for building highly flexible and optimized middleware solutions.