Middleware for Internet of Things: Survey and Challenges

The Internet of things (IoT) applications span many potential fields. Furthermore, smart homes, smart cities, smart vehicular networks, and healthcare are very attractive and intelligent applications. In most of these applications, the system consists of smart objects that are equipped by sensors and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and may rely on other technological computing and paradigm solutions such as M2M (machine to machine) computing, Wifi, Wimax, LTE, cloud computing, etc. Thus, the IoT vision foresees that we can shift from traditional sensor networks to pervasive systems, which deliver intelligent automation by running services on objects. Actually, a significant attention has been given to designing a middleware that supports many features; heterogeneity, mobility, scalability, multiplicity, and security. This papers reviews the-state-of-the-art techniques for IoT middleware systems and reveals an interesting classification for these systems into service and agent-oriented systems. Therefore two visions have emerged to provide the IoT middleware systems: Via designing the middleware for IoT system as an eco-system of services or as an eco-system of agents. The most common feature of the two approaches is the ability to overcome heterogeneity issues. However, the agent approach provides context awareness and intelligent elements. The review presented in this paper includes a detailed comparison between the IoT middleware approaches. The paper also explores challenges that form directions for future research on IoT middleware systems. Some of the challenges arise, because some crucial features are not provided (or at most partially provided) by the existing middleware systems, while others have not been yet tackled by current research in IoT.     

Smart devices and spaces for pervasive computing

Applications and services for pervasive computing have been dramatically grown and have contributed extensively to our daily experiences in recent years. Smart systems, devices, and spaces are proactive for ubiquitous and pervasive computing. Smart information technology (IT) is also an outcome of the state of the art and novel mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies that include highly capable handheld device, pervasive and personal device, etc. This special issue will be a trigger for further related research and technology improvements in pervasive and ubiquitous computing using smart devices and services. This special issue called for original papers describing the latest developments, trends, and solutions of smart devices and spaces for pervasive computing including real-time operating systems (OS), tiny OS and middleware supports, mobile system performance, trustworthy Internet and communications, agents and mobile and pervasive services, among others. In particular, this special issue focuses on a remote control and media-sharing system, flash storage-based smart system, heterogeneous mobile OS, and prediction and auto-execution system for pervasive computing.     

普适计算中间件技术的研究与进展

当前,普适计算已经成为计算机科学中一个极具活力和影响力的研究领域。普适计算环境规模很大并且具有高度异构性,如网络架构的异构性、硬件平台的异构性、操作系统的异构性、应用服务的异构性等,而普适计算中间件技术可以解决异构性和跨平台特征,提供不同服务的集成应用,因此成为普适计算中的一个研究热点。基于此,本文对于目前国外关于普适计算中间件技术的研究现状做了一个总结;通过分析和比较,给出了普适计算中间件的设计原则;探讨了普适计算中间件技术的未来发展方向。     

普适计算中间件技术

普适计算中间件通过软件基础设施重用支持上层应用的高效开发和便捷运行,是普适计算领域的研究热点。对普适计算中间件设计挑战进行了归纳,从上下文管理、中间件层自适应、面向自适应的公共服务和自适应软件体系结构支持等方面总结、阐述和分析了普适计算中间件的各项关键技术,分类介绍了主要普适计算中间件项目,给出了未来研究发展趋势。     

A survey on pervasive education

Researchers and developers worldwide have put their efforts into the design, development and use of information and communication technology to support teaching and learning. This research is driven by pedagogical as well as technological disciplines. The most challenging ideas are currently found in the application of mobile, ubiquitous, pervasive, contextualized and seamless technologies for education, which we shall refer to as pervasive education. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the existing work in this field and categorizes it with respect to educational settings. Using this approach, best practice solutions for certain educational settings and open questions for pervasive education are highlighted in order to inspire interested developers and educators. The work is assigned to different fields, identified by the main pervasive technologies used and the educational settings. Based on these assignments we identify areas within pervasive education that are currently disregarded or deemed challenging so that further research and development in these fields are stimulated in a trans-disciplinary approach.     

Dynamic Service Composition in Pervasive Computing

Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) promise to provide transparency to resource access by exposing the resources available as services. SOAs have been employed within pervasive computing systems to provide essential support to user tasks by creating services representing the available resources. The mechanism of combining two or more basic services into a possibly complex service is known as service composition. Existing solutions to service composition employ a template-matching approach, where the user needs are expressed as a request template, and through composition, a system would identify services to populate the entities within the request template. However, with the dynamism involved in pervasive environments, the user needs have to be met by exploiting available resources, even when an exact match does not exist. In this paper, we present a novel service composition mechanism for pervasive computing. We employ the service-oriented middleware platform called pervasive information communities organization (PICO) to model and represent resources as services. The proposed service composition mechanism models services as directed attributed graphs, maintains a repository of service graphs, and dynamically combines multiple basic services into complex services. Further, we present a hierarchical overlay structure created among the devices to exploit the resource unevenness, resulting in the capability of providing essential service-related support to resource-poor devices. Results of extensive simulation studies are presented to illustrate the suitability of the proposed mechanism in meeting the challenges of pervasive computing user mobility, heterogeneity, and the uncertain nature of involved resources.     

A middleware solution for integrating and exploring IoT and HPC capabilities

Even with the considerable advances in the development of middleware solutions, there is still a substantial gap in Internet of Things (IoT) and high-performance computing (HPC) integration. It is not possible to expose services such as processing, storage, sensing, security, context awareness, and actuating in a unified manner with the existing middleware solutions. The consequence is the utilization of several solutions with their particularities, thus requiring different skills. Besides that, the users have to solve the integration and all heterogeneity issues. To reduce the gap between IoT and HPC technologies, we present the JavaCá&Lá (JCL), a middleware used to help the implementation of distributed user-applications classified as IoT-HPC. This ubiquity is possible because JCL incorporates (1) a single application programming interface to program different device categories; (2) the support for different programming models; (3) the interoperability of sensing, processing, storage, and actuating services; (4) the integration with MQTT technology; and (5) security, context awareness, and actions services introduced through JCL application programming interface. Experimental evaluations demonstrated that JCL scales when doing the IoT-HPC services. Additionally, we identify that customized JCL deployments become an alternative when Java-Android and vice-versa code conversion is necessary. The MQTT brokers usually are faster than JCL HashMap sensing storage, but they do not perform distributed, so they cannot handle a huge amount of sensing data. Finally, a short example for monitoring moving objects exemplifies JCL facilities for IoT-HPC development.     

The Gator Tech Smart House: a programmable pervasive space

Research groups in both academia and industry have developed prototype systems to demonstrate the benefits of pervasive computing in various application domains. Unfortunately, many first-generation pervasive computing systems lack the ability to evolve as new technologies emerge or as an application domain matures. To address this limitation, the University of Florida's Mobile and Pervasive Computing Laboratory is developing programmable pervasive spaces in which a smart space exists as both a runtime environment and a software library. Service discovery and gateway protocols automatically integrate system components using generic middleware that maintains a service definition for each sensor and actuator in the space. The Gator Tech Smart House in Gainesville, Florida, is the culmination of more than five years of research in pervasive and mobile computing. The project's goal is to create assistive environments such as homes that can sense themselves and their residents and enact mappings between the physical world and remote monitoring and intervention services.     

Agents, grids, and middleware

Agents, grids, and middleware are more closely related. We develop software architecture for two software projects: one involves infrastructure for distributed, pervasive computing; the other involves partitioning huge data sets across data grids consisting of thousands of PCs. On the surface, these projects seem very different, but there are similarities and lessons we can learn from comparing them that have implications for agents, grids, Web services, pervasive computing, and middleware.     

Architecting cloud‐enabled systems: a systematic survey of challenges and solutions

The literature on the challenges of and potential solutions to architecting cloud‐based systems is rapidly growing but is scattered. It is important to systematically analyze and synthesize the existing research on architecting cloud‐based software systems in order to build a cohesive body of knowledge of the reported challenges and solutions. We have systematically identified and reviewed 133 papers that report architecture‐related challenges and solutions for cloud‐based software systems. This paper reports the methodological details, findings, and implications of a systematic review that has enabled us to identify 44 unique categories of challenges and associated solutions for architecting cloud‐based software systems. We assert that the identified challenges and solutions classified into the categories form a body of knowledge that can be leveraged for designing or evaluating software architectures for cloud‐based systems. Our key conclusions are that a large number of primary studies focus on middleware services aimed at achieving scalability, performance, response time, and efficient resource optimization. Architecting cloud‐based systems presents unique challenges as the systems to be designed range from pervasive embedded systems and enterprise applications to smart devices with Internet of Things. We also conclude that there is a huge potential of research on architecting cloud‐based systems in areas related to green computing, energy efficient systems, mobile cloud computing, and Internet of Things. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A qualitative human-centric evaluation of flexibility in middleware implementations

Today middleware is much more powerful, more reliable and faster than it used to be. Nevertheless, for the application developer, the complexity of using middleware platforms has increased accordingly. The volume and variety of application contexts that current middleware technologies have to support require that developers be able to anticipate the widest possible range of execution environments, desired and undesired effects of different programming strategies, handling procedures for runtime errors, and so on. This paper shows how a generic framework designed to evaluate the usability of notations (the Cognitive Dimensions of Notations Framework, or CDN) has been instantiated and used to analyze the cognitive challenges involved in adapting middleware platforms. This human-centric perspective allowed us to achieve novel results compared to existing middleware evaluation research, typically centered around system performance metrics. The focus of our study is on the process of adapting middleware implementations, rather than in the end product of this activity. Our main contributions are twofold. First, we describe a qualitative CDN-based method to analyze the cognitive effort made by programmers while adapting middleware implementations. And second, we show how two platforms designed for flexibility have been compared, suggesting that certain programming language design features might be particularly helpful for developers.     

普适计算中间件技术的研究

普适计算中间件是目前普适计算领域的研究热点之一。普适计算环境的动态性和异构性对中间件技术提出了新的要求,而动态对象模型中间件和自适应中间件能够适应普适计算环境。文章主要分析了这两种中间件的基本原理、关键技术和特点。     

A grid middleware for distributed Java computing with MPI binding and process migration supports

“Grid” computing has emerged as an important new research field. With years of efforts, grid researchers have successfully developed grid technologies including security solutions,resource management protocols, information query protocols, and data management services. How-ever, as the ultimate goal of grid computing is to design an infrastructure which supports dynarnic,cross-organizational resource sharing, there is a need of solutions for efficient and transparent task re-scheduling in the grid. In this research, a new grid middleware is proposed, called G-JavaMPI. This middleware adds the parallel computing capability of Java to the grid with the support of a Grid-enabled message passing interface (MPI) for inter-process communication between Java processes executed at dif-ferent grid points. A special feature of the proposed G-JavaMPI is the support of Java process migration with post-migration message redirection. With these supports, it is possible to migrate executing Java process from site to site for continuous computation, if some site is scheduled to be turned down for system reconfiguration. Moreover, the proposed G-JavaMPI middleware is very portable since it requires no modification of underlying OS, Java virtual machine, and MPI package. Preliminary performance tests have been conducted. The proposed mechanisms have shown good migration efficiency in a simulated grid environment.     

面向普适计算的动态自适应中间件模型

为了提高普适计算系统的开发效率, 设计了一个基于OSGi框架的动态普适计算中间件模型. 该中间件模型以OSGi框架为基础, 建立移动管理器管理用户和服务的移动, 利用上下文管理器来管理上下文, 动态调整自己的行为, 支持上下文感知应用. 通过标准的接口实现各种异构普适设备间的互操作性. 实验结果表明该中间件能够满足通用普适计算环境的要求, 对于普适计算系统的开发具有一定的借鉴意义.     

支持感知上下文网络操作平台中间件的研究

普适计算的出现将大大改变人类与各种设备交互的方式。支持感知上下文计算的网络操作平台是普适计算环境下重要的应用支撑平台,为基于传感器网络的应用提供操作服务。操作平台以中间件为核心,采用XMLWebServices技术。文章以满足包括智能家居普适上下文应用需求的网络操作平台为基础,介绍该网络操作平台的机制、层次结构和数据模型的研究,并实现了基于该平台模型的XMLWebServices中间件应用方案。     

Combining heterogeneous service technologies for building an Internet of Things middleware

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is a technology that allows ordinary objects to be uniquely identified by “smart tags” which are also capable of storing small quantities of data. The term Internet of Things was originated from a vision strongly coupled with supply-chain concerns and RFID tagged objects. However the idea of such Internet of Things has evolved in a wider sense, referring now to a ubiquitous object society combining RFID, sensor networks and pervasive computing technologies. This scenario involves different requirements such as heterogeneity and dynamicity of objects, sensors, applications and protocols as well as the need for allowing the dynamic evolution of such applications. These issues seemed to be easily addressed if the principles of service-oriented computing (SOC), like loose coupling and heterogeneity, are used for constructing such architectures and applications. In this paper we underline what benefits SOC can offer to constructing a middleware for the Internet of Things. These concepts have been applied in a service-oriented middleware that tries to leverage the existing Internet of Things architectural concepts by using SOC principles in order to bring more flexibility and dynamicity. We describe the approaches used in that middleware and the lessons learned from that experience. This middleware was initially tested on an application for tracking and monitoring supply-chain objects, and later extended to target wider application domains that are also described in this paper. The project described here has become part of the OW2 AspireRFID open-source project.     

普适计算中间件技术的研究

普适计算作为新的计算模式对中间件技术有一些特殊的要求。该文从普适计算的特点出发，分析了普适计算中间件硬解决的有关问题和需求，提出了构建普适中间件的4个设计原则，分析了c0TS中间件技术和典型普适计算中间件的技术特点并指出了普适计算中间件技术的发展趋势。     

面向普适计算的自适应软件集成环境研究综述

在对当今主要普适计算研究项目,尤其是面向普适计算的软件集成环境原型系统进行介绍的基础上,本文对面向普适计算的软件集成环境所关注的共性问题进行了归纳分析,包括如何为应用提供自适应的软件体系结构支持、如何为应用提供普适计算环境下所需的可重用服务、如何根据普适计算环境的特点对传统中间件技术的内涵进行扩展等等,并对面向普适计算的应用需求下软件集成环境研究所面临的挑战进行了讨论。     

State-of-the-art research study for green cloud computing

Although cloud computing has rapidly emerged as a widely accepted computing paradigm, the research on cloud computing is still at an early stage. Cloud computing suffers from different challenging issues related to security, software frameworks, quality of service, standardization, and power consumption. Efficient energy management is one of the most challenging research issues. The core services in cloud computing system are the SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). In this paper, we study state-of-the-art techniques and research related to power saving in the IaaS of a cloud computing system, which consumes a huge part of total energy in a cloud computing system. At the end, some feasible solutions for building green cloud computing are proposed. Our aim is to provide a better understanding of the design challenges of energy management in the IaaS of a cloud computing system.     

Opportunities and obligations for physical computing systems

The recent confluence of embedded and real-time systems with wireless, sensor, and networking technologies is creating a nascent infrastructure for a technical, economic, and social revolution. Based on the seamless integration of computing with the physical world via sensors and actuators, this revolution will accrue many benefits. Potentially, its impact could be similar to that of the current Internet. We believe developers must focus on the physical, real-time, and embedded aspects of pervasive computing. We refer to this domain as physical computing systems. For pervasive computing to achieve its promise, developers must create not only high-level system software and application solutions, but also low-level embedded systems solutions. To better understand physical computing's advantages, we consider three application areas: assisted living, emergency response systems for natural or man-made disasters, and protecting critical infrastructures at the national level.