An SCA-Based Middleware Platform for Mobile Devices

Abstract

In pervasive environments, users can potentially access a variety of services through their mobile devices. However, in order to use the new services, we need to adapt the functionality of these devices. To achieve it, we propose to load a bootstrap into them that is able to communicate with the services. However this bootstrap has to be adapted due to the diversity of services offered in the environment, which are heterogeneous regarding aspects such as communication and discovery. Our bootstrap has two layers: the application layer and the middleware layer. This paper focuses in the middleware layer. We propose an architecture based on the service component architecture (SCA). The architecture eases the reconfiguration of the components at runtime to support different communication mechanisms and service discovery protocols. Besides, using SCA, we can add new functionality to the middleware platform that can be provided by remote applications (SCA or not).