Network-centric middleware supporting dynamic Web Service deployment on heterogeneous embedded systems

The market for embedded systems performing dedicated tasks is growing in large numbers in recent years. They are utilized in manifold application areas for different use case scenarios. Three prevailing fields are pervasive healthcare, homeland security applications, and environmental mitigation management including energy conserving applications. The increasing demands for remotely manageable monitoring purposes ask for flexible networking concepts and interoperability of the involved devices with standard Web Services. Furthermore due to the prevailing platform heterogeneity of the embedded systems market, software development on these platforms became a very complex and time consuming field of work. This paper describes an efficient way to counter these new requirements by utilizing the Device Profile for Web Services (DPWS) framework on top of the OSGi platform.