Middies: passive middleware abstractions for pervasive computing environments

As the pervasive computing paradigm develops, it is necessary to have means of communication for applications executing over the many disparate devices that form pervasive computing environments. The dynamically changing set of resources and services available in such environments stems both from the nature of distributed systems and the mobility of devices that constitute temporary parts of the system. Our work draws on concepts from many existing middleware systems, primarily concentrating on tuple spaces such as Linda (Gelertner, 1985) and LIME (Murphy et al., 2003), publish-subscribe systems such as Elvin (Segall and Arnold, 1997), and blackboards such as Hearsay-II (Erman et al., 1980), We present our model of middies, generalised passive middleware abstractions that can be used to construct middleware systems with operations and semantics desirable to the applications with which they will be used in a pervasive computing environment.