Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Middleware for Pervasive Mobile and Embedded Computing

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed tablet devices gain a prominent spot in the limelight, with offerings from all main mobile device manufacturers hitting the market, combined with the release of operating systems targeting them. The smart phone landscape continues to evolve with new offerings supporting a variety of sensors, higher resolution and bigger size screens, high definition video recording and playback, and enhanced gaming. Embedded devices like game consoles have grown from just gaming machines to home multimedia systems supporting video on demand and novel user interaction through 3D displays, and movement detection based controllers. At the same time, televisions and TV set top boxes move towards HD, IP and 3D TV, and DNLA connectivity. The pervasiveness of such mobile and embedded devices has given rise to a variety of novel applications, such as healthcare monitoring, enhanced shopping applications/environments, ad-hoc gaming, sport tracking, street navigation and observation, context-aware collaborative computing, participatory sensing, mobile social web applications, etc. Equipped with access to cloud computing infrastructures, developers have the ability to enhance these resource-constrained devices with unlimited storage and computing resources offering further opportunities for innovative applications and uses. Despite these successes, software development for such devices and platforms remains largely ad hoc and time consuming, while interoperability among applications, devices and platforms is largely elusive. Middleware has a key role to play in overcoming these problems. However, it is still unclear what are the appropriate middleware abstractions and supporting infrastructures necessary for such applications. The resource constrained nature and mobility of such devices place unique requirements for middleware and call for the exploration of novel programming abstractions, and supporting services, while capabilities such as location and contextawareness open new avenues for radical approaches in their development. Building on the success of the 2009 and 2010 events, the M-MPAC workshop this year sought to further develop a roadmap for research on the essential middleware abstractions and infrastructures for pervasive mobile and embedded computing. Six long papers, two short ones and a poster were selected for inclusion to these proceedings. They cover a broad range of issues including an epidemic scheme for software updates distribution on mobile devices; an approach for producing compact XML processing code for mobile devices; a service discovery protocol for large scale networks of mobile devices providing and consuming ubiquitous services; a web service for optimized information transfer between mobile devices, social networks, and third-party web services; a decentralised tuple space with contextual mediation capabilities for data distributors and consumers; a generic context acquisition engine capable of context capturing, composition and broadcasting; a decentralized middleware for location and synchronization of files and folders stored on multiple mobile devices; a decentralized collaborative route searching service based on observations of public transport users; and a RESTful protocol for data replication in mobile devices.