Middleware for distributed collaborative ad-hoc environments

Modern interactive collaborative environments include the personal devices of users and can be created spontaneously in various places. The lack of infrastructure as well as the heterogeneous and mobile nature of devices increases the complexity of development of useful and well-integrated collaborative applications. This paper presents work on a middleware concept that addresses the problems of service discovery, establishment of communication between devices, synchronization and data-security within such environments. The development of collaborative applications is simplified through the use of functionalities provided by the middleware. The different services of applications are categorized in freely definable groups (context zones) to manage access authorization and unify the necessary communication channels between devices. To reduce the overhead of necessary information exchange between devices within the distributed environment, the middleware is designed as a central instance per device that hosts application specific components and manages their life cycle.