Recent Advances in Mobile Middleware for Wireless Systems and Services

摘要

It is not debatable that mobile services, i.e., service provisioning not only to mobile portable devices with possibly multiple heterogeneous wireless interfaces but also depending on different aspects of mobile users' contexts (client location, local resource availability, portable device characteristics, ...), are expected to be a tremendously relevant business market in the very next years. The recent progresses in wireless technologies and computing miniaturization have permitted to enable today's pervasive and ubiquitous computing scenarios that were considered science-fiction only a few years ago. But that is a relatively old story...rnThe novel aspect of the last couple of years is that it starts to be widely recognized that the next crucial technological challenge in mobile services is to identify, propose, validate, and spread the adoption of open and interoperable software-support solutions specifically designed and implemented for wireless-enabled portable devices. Only such support solutions, called mobile middlewares in the following, can allow to accelerate andrnsimplify the development and deployment of mobile services over heterogeneous devices, by leaving service developers ideally with the only burden of concentrating their efforts on application logic, without taking into account the implementation issues related to collecting and processing context data over heterogeneous environments, properly and synergically managing several heterogeneous wireless interfaces and the deriving multi-homing opportunities, integrating and orchestrating heterogeneous service components possibly discovered at runtime, and so on.