Middleware for Automatic Dynamic Reconfiguration of Context-Driven Services

Abstract

In the emerging ubiquitous Internet scenario users require to access services and contents from anywhere, at anytime and with any device. Due to this requirement, platforms for service and content provisioning have to address several problems related to the new issues of mobility, multimodality, context awareness and content adaptation. However, current ubiquitous service provisioning platforms still suffer a main drawback: they often underestimate platform logic complexity when multiple ubiquity features should be provided. As a result, the proposed solutions lack a unified approach to the ubiquity issues and provide only limited sets of features. We claim that an integrated and comprehensive solution can stem from a simplicity principle: our approach pushes ubiquity features outside the core middleware layer, by keeping only management and coordination responsibilities. That succeeds in making the middleware design clearer and neater. In this paper we present the key architectural aspects of our middleware platform for ubiquitous dynamic context-driven service provisioning and reconfiguration. We also provide implementation details and description of typical use cases our platform successfully realizes.