Lightweight Middleware Research Articles

Efficient deployment of remote laboratories with TwinCAT-PLCs and EjsS Plugins

This paper describes a new approach to streamline the development of Remote Laboratories (RL) for Control Education based on TwinCAT Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) and Easy JavaScript Simulations (EJsS). On one hand, the TwinCAT PLC is used to implement the laboratory back-end (responsible of closing the feedback loop over the plant under study) with industrial real-time automation methodologies. On the other hand, EJsS is used: 1) to define the RL Human-Machine Interface (HMI) front-end (used by the students to parametrize & observe the evolution of the PLC behavior and signals) and 2) to smooth and centralize the majority of the tasks that the instructors have to perform to configure and deploy the RL. This second utility of EJsS, a novelty of the RL presented in this paper, is supported by an EJsS Plugin that has been especially designed with that purpose. Besides, it is worth noting that our new RL is supported by an improved version of ReNoLabs, developed in 2016 to be a lightweight middle-ware of RLs with EJsS HMI webpages and different types of back-ends, whose Node.js-based server has been updated to backup the functionality of the EJsS Plugin. This paper also shows how to use our approach to setup a RL and describes the main characteristics of two RLs that have been updated with it.

A Secure Mutual authentication approach to fog computing environment

Fog computing is a new emerging technology that complements the cloud and extends the services of cloud computing to be closer to the end devices. The cloud is usually located far from the devices which use their services and some of the recent research suggests that using a fog server as a nearby lightweight middleware can bridge the gap and provides rich resources closer to the end devices. Security is a crucial factor for the appropriate functioning of fog computing. In particular, authentication and key exchange are significant challenges which need to be taken into consideration in fog computing. Ensuring secure mutual authentication is very important for the security of fog computing since fog servers provide services to number of end users. However, the existing mutual authentication schemes are either having large computational overheads or are not able to achieve secure mutual authentication. In this paper, we propose a fog-based mutual authentication scheme using low-cost primitives such as Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and one-way hash functions. We also present the formal security analysis of our authentication approach to show that it protects all the interacting entities against various known cyber attacks. In addition, we validate our authentication scheme using the SPAN of AVISPA tool to confirm that it protects end users against several attacks. We evaluate our proposed authentication approach by comparing it against state-of-the-art authentication schemes. Finally, through a case study and performance evaluation, we illustrate that our approach provides a secure and lightweight mutual key exchange protocol between three parties: the cloud, fog and edge devices.

VFS_CS: a light-weight and extensible virtual file system middleware for cloud storage system

In cloud environments, data-intensive applications have been widely deployed to solve non-trivial applications, while cloud-based storage systems usually fail to provide desirable performance and efficiency when running those data-intensive applications. To address the problems of storage capacity and performance when executing data-intensive applications, we design and implement a light-weight distributed file system middleware, namely virtual file system for cloud storage, which allows other storage-level services to be easily incorporated into an integrated framework in a plug-in manner. In the proposed middleware, we implement three effective mechanisms: disk caching, file striping, and metadata management. The implementation of the proposed middleware has been deployed in a realistic cloud platform, and its performance has been thoroughly investigated under various workloads. Experimental results show that it can significantly improve I/O performance compared with existing approaches. In addition, it also exhibits better robustness when the cloud system is facing intensive workloads.

VFS_CS: a light-weight and extensible virtual file system middleware for cloud storage system

VFS_CS: a light-weight and extensible virtual file system middleware for cloud storage system

A general‐purpose distributed computing Java middleware

SummaryThe middleware solutions for General‐Purpose Distributed Computing (GPDC) have distinct requirements, such as task scheduling, processing/storage fault tolerance, code portability for parallel or distributed environments, simple deployment (including over grid or multi‐cluster environments), collaborative development, low code refactoring, native support for distributed data structures, asynchronous task execution, and support for distributed global variables. These solutions do not integrate these requirements into a single deployment with a unique API exposing most of these requirements to users. The consequence is the utilization of several solutions with their particularities, thus requiring different user skills. Besides that, the users have to solve the integration and all heterogeneity issues. To reduce this integration gap, in this paper, we present Java Cá&Lá (JCL), a distributed‐shared‐memory and task‐oriented lightweight middleware for the Java community that separates business logic from distribution issues during the development process and incorporates several requirements that were presented separately in the GPDC middleware literature over the last few decades. JCL allows building distributed or parallel applications with only a few portable API calls, thus reducing the integration problems. Finally, it also runs on different platforms, including small single‐board computers. This work compares and contrasts JCL with other Java middleware systems and reports experimental evaluations of JCL applications in several distinct scenarios.

Broker-less middleware for WSAN performance evaluation

Over the past few years, The cost of electronic devices and sensor networks decreased rapidly enforcing almost all users’ requirements to use those devices. These devices provide low cost processing in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), As well as in wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs). The task of data management in WSNs is a vital issue that can be performed with limited resources such as processing, Memory and energy. Data distribution service (DDS) is a prominent standard used in the industry and academia communities to support real-time distributed systems depending on publish/subscribe (pub/sub) model. tinyDDS is a lightweight middleware that is a partial porting of the DDS and implemented over tinyOS code. The original version of tinyDDS is called the default tinyDDS (defTDDS). broker-less tinyDDS (BLTDDS) and hybrid tinyDDS (hyTDDS) are protocols that added several improvements to the defTDDS. The energy aware tinyDDS (EATDDS) protocol is proposed to deal directly with the energy consumption metric. In this paper, We conduct a comparative study between defTDDS, BLTDDS and hyTDDS in terms of throughput, PDR, End-to-end delay and energy consumption. Moreover, We propose a new protocol named an enhanced energy aware tinyDDS (E-EATDDS) that improves the energy consumption of the EATDDS protocol. We use tinyOS simulator in our implementation and evaluation. The results show that E-EATDDS outperforms BLTDDS, hyTDDS and EATDDS in terms of number of packets sent per joule.

Cocoon: A lightweight opportunistic networking middleware for community-oriented smart mobile applications

Modern society is surrounded by an ample spectrum of smart mobile devices. This ubiquity forms a high potential for community-oriented opportunistic ad hoc networking applications. Nevertheless, today’s smart mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, and wristbands are still onerous to automatically establish mobile ad hoc connections with our physical circle of friends and between occasional contact opportunities. Motivated by this, this study presents Cocoon as a lightweight middleware proposed for smart mobile platforms to support mobile opportunistic communications for general public use. Cocoon employs an adaptive context-aware service that can fairly coordinate a multitude of concurrently-running networking applications. Along with this service, the opportunistic networking service of Cocoon facilitates fast and reliable information sharing between participating devices according to our real-world applicability and validation experiments presented in this work. The routing protocols of Cocoon are designed above the universally-accepted Wi-Fi and Bluetooth standards. Without requiring any configuration or modification on top of the affiliated wireless interfaces, Cocoon is therefore suitable for direct use on any kind of smart mobile platform.

High-level Programming and Symbolic Reasoning on IoT Resource Constrained Devices

While the vision of Internet of Things (IoT) is rather inspiring, its practical implementation remains challenging. Conventional programming approaches prove unsuitable to provide IoT resource constrained devices with the distributed processing capabilities required to implement intelligent, autonomic, and self-organizing behaviors. In our previous work, we had already proposed an alternative programming methodology for such systems that is characterized by high-level programming and symbolic expressions evaluation, and developed a lightweight middleware to support it. Our approach allows for interactive programming of deployed nodes, and it is based on the simple but effective paradigm of executable code exchange among nodes. In this paper, we show how our methodology can be used to provide IoT resource constrained devices with reasoning abilities by implementing a Fuzzy Logic symbolic extension on deployed nodes at runtime.

A lightweight middleware framework for vehicle networking application

SummaryThere is a growing need for Vehicle Networking Applications (VNAs) development that does not require users to learn the details of VNA data processing and message transfer. VNAs have some special requirements differing from other general‐purpose applications, such as real‐time performance, extensibility, compatibility, and reusability. To meet with these requirements of the VNAs, we propose a lightweight middleware framework for VNAs in this article. In the middle framework, we design multi‐layer middleware architecture to separate VNAs from the software platform and to improve the adaptability for the heterogeneous network and various vehicle networking communication protocols. Meanwhile, the middleware architecture consists of fixed and exchangeable modules to improve the middleware reusability. And the component bus is presented in a framework to standardize component interfaces to improve the extensibility of middleware. The framework has an efficient and simple structure to guarantee the real‐time performance of data processing and message transferring. This middleware also provides a uniform communication mechanism to be compatible with other existing middleware. In this article, we describe the design ideas and the composition of each module in the middleware framework, and analyze the data flow in communication process. We also develop the middleware prototypes to verify the feasibility of the middleware framework. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An energy-efficient enhanced virtual resource provision middleware in clouds

In the past few years, cloud computing has emerged as a promising paradigm for delivering IT-infrastructures, platforms, applications and services. The consolidation of this new paradigm in both commercial business and academic research requires that the underlying resources should be economically managed. In this paper, we present a resource provision framework, which is aiming at improving the energy-efficiency of cloud-based data centres. The proposed framework is implemented as a lightweight middleware, which consists of three novel services that enable cloud providers to up/down scale their virtual resource pool in an efficient manner. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness and the performance of the proposed middleware in real-world cloud platform. The results indicate that it can significantly improving the energy-efficiency in virtualised clouds without significantly degradation on application performance.

A Lightweight Middleware Platform for Distributed Computing on Wireless Sensor Networks

The peculiar features of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) suggest to exploit the distributed computing paradigm to perform complex tasks in a collaborative manner, in order to overcome the constraints related to sensor nodes limited capabilities. In this context, we describe a lightweight middleware platform to support the development of distributed applications on WSNs. The platform provides just a minimal general-purpose software layer, while the application components, including communication and processing algorithms, as well as the exchanged data, are described symbolically, with neither preformed syntax nor strict distinction between data and code. Our approach allows for interactive development of applications on each node, and requires no cross-compilation, a common practice that makes the development of WSN applications rigid and time-consuming. This way, tasks and behavior of each node can be modified at runtime, even after the network deployment, by sending the node executable code.

Pervasive Smart Spaces and Environments: A Service-Oriented Middleware Architecture for Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks

In the twenty-first century, the impact of wireless and ubiquitous technologies is changing the way people perceive and interact with the physical world. These communication paradigms promise to change and redefine, in a reasonably short period of time, the most common way of our everyday living. The continuous advances in the field of Wireless Sensor Networks and their direct application in Smart Spaces are clear examples of it. However, in order for this kind of new generation infrastructures to have a large-scale dissemination, there are still some open issues to tackle. In this way, this paper presents nSOM, a service-oriented framework based on sensor network design that provides internetworking services with the Internet cloud. This lightweight middleware architecture implements an agent-based virtual sensor service approach which is a compact semantic knowledge management scheme based on a dynamic composition model.

A DDS‐based middleware for quality‐of‐service and high‐performance networked robotics

SUMMARYSocial robots must adapt to dynamic environments, human interaction partners and challenging new stringent tasks. Their inner software is usually distributed and should be designed and deployed carefully because slight changes in the robot's requirements can have an important impact not only on the existing source code but also on the resulting performance at run‐time. This paper proposes an implementation of this inner software using a new lightweight middleware for networked robotics called Nerve. The principal novelty this middleware has with respect to other state‐of‐the‐art approaches is that it guarantees both scalability and QoS, which are key requirements for real‐time robotics software. The benefits of Nerve have been proved through its use in two key components of the cognitive system of a social robot: (i) the visual attention mechanism, used to extract relevant data from perceived images; and (ii) a robot learning by imitation control architecture that allows the social robot to be taught by people using natural demonstrations (i.e. using the same communication channels that would be used to teach people). Nerve makes use of existing patterns for networked applications together with the recent Data Distribution Service specification, which is a publish/subscribe standard for real‐time and distributed systems that provides a wide set of QoS policies. In this paper, these different QoS policies have been applied carefully to achieve the best performance of the target robot. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Building service-oriented Smart Infrastructures over Wireless Ad Hoc Sensor Networks: A middleware perspective

The increase in physical resources for the next-generation of embedded computing devices, as well as in the efforts carried out by the scientific and research communities, is paving the way for Smart Infrastructures based on Wireless Sensor Networks. In such manner, not only open and formally defined Service-Oriented Frameworks are required, but also efficient middleware technologies that ease the development of new sensor-based services. From the cornerstone analysis of pervasive computing principles applied to Smart Spaces creation, this article presents the μSMS (micro Subscription Management System) middleware. This approach specifies and develops the notion of virtual sensor services created for Smart Environments over sensor networks from tiny in-network services based on agent technology. In the framework of the μSWN European Research Project, this architecture has been validated in a Smart Hospital real-world scenario using a healthcare virtual sensor service. Considering such purpose, medical status monitoring, location tracking and perimeter surveillance agent-based services have been developed. This study is concluded by a comparative analysis of the system considering memory overhead, packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay and battery lifetime as evaluation metrics. The results show a lightweight middleware implementation with good overall system and network performance.

On-demand service hosting on production grid infrastructures

The Software as a Service (SaaS) methodology is a key paradigm of Cloud computing. In this paper, we focus on an interesting topic--to dynamically host services on existing production Grid infrastructures. In general, production Grids normally employ a Job-Submission-Execution (JSE) model with rigid access interfaces. In this paper, we implement the Cyberaide onServe, a lightweight middleware with a virtual appliance. The Cyberaide onServe implements the SaaS model on production Grids by translating the SaaS model to the JSE model. The Cyberaide onServe can be deployed on demand in a virtual appliance, host users' software as a Web service, accept Web service invocations; finally, the Cyberaide onServe can execute them on production Grids. We have deployed the Cyberaide onServe on the TeraGrid and the test results show that the Cyberaide onServe can provide SaaS functionalities with a good performance.

Bringing pervasive embedded networks to the service cloud: A lightweight middleware approach

The emergence of novel pervasive networks that consist of tiny embedded nodes have reduced the gap between real and virtual worlds. This paradigm has opened the Service Cloud to a variety of wireless devices especially those with sensorial and actuating capabilities. Those pervasive networks contribute to build new context-aware applications that interpret the state of the physical world at real-time. However, traditional Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), which are widely used in the current Internet are unsuitable for such resource-constraint devices since they are too heavy. In this research paper, an internetworking approach is proposed in order to address that important issue. The main part of our proposal is the Knowledge-Aware and Service-Oriented (KASO) Middleware that has been designed for pervasive embedded networks. KASO Middleware implements a diversity of mechanisms, services and protocols which enable developers and business processing designers to deploy, expose, discover, compose, and orchestrate real-world services (i.e. services running on sensor/actuator devices). Moreover, KASO Middleware implements endpoints to offer those services to the Cloud in a REST manner. Our internetworking approach has been validated through a real healthcare telemonitoring system deployed in a sanatorium. The validation tests show that KASO Middleware successfully brings pervasive embedded networks to the Service Cloud.

DSOA

Ubiquitous environments are composed by a wide variety of devices, each one with different characteristics like communication protocol, programming and hardware platforms. These devices range from powerful equipment, like PCs, to limited ones, like cell phones, sensors, and actuators. The services provided by a ubiquitous environment rely on the interaction among devices. In order to support the development of applications in this context, the heterogeneity of communication protocols must be abstracted and the functionalities dynamically provided by devices should be easily available to application developers. This paper proposes a Device Service Oriented Architecture (DSOA) as an abstraction layer to help organize devices and its resources in a ubiquitous environment, while hiding details about communication protocols from developers. Based on DSOA, a lightweight middleware (uOS) and a high level protocol (uP) were developed. A use case is presented to illustrate the application of these concepts.

Development of LED smart switch with light-weight middleware for location-aware services in smart home

In recent years, the home network has focused on service diversity and the intelligent enhancement of devices for providing user-centric services. Recent studies dealing with home network systems aggregate the sensor data and manage various devices for reasoning the adaptive services. However, home network systems, especially intelligent devices, are difficult to implement due to the high setup cost and the problems with interconnection among other devices in a home domain. Therefore, we consider the intelligent implementation of light switch present in whole spaces. We propose a LED Smart switch with light-weight middleware which provides location-aware service and pattern-based service prediction. The proposed switch with an embedded sensor manages active and passive events according to the sensor data analysis and the service reasoning. Furthermore, the LED smart switch locates the user and interconnects among other switches over a network connection. The smart switch using a LED display provides simple information service, such as weather forecast, stock information, and the light status, using icons and digitalized voices. To evaluate the efficiency of our switch, we implemented testbed, in a home and an office. Our switch reduces the service response time by up to 12% for our experiment.

Development of portable intelligent gateway system for ubiquitous entertainment and location-aware push services

Intelligent gateway systems have evolved to seamlessly offer location-aware and multimedia services, allowing multi users to roam among multi service domains. In the past decade intelligent gateways have been implemented to support context-aware multimedia services with network convergence and service reasoning mechanisms in multi domains. However, recent researches have to consider multiple events and service management according to the user's movements and requirements. Therefore, we propose a Portable Intelligent Gateway System (PIGS) to offer seamless device-independent multimedia services and location-aware push services. Using heterogeneous network convergence and utilizing cooperation between other gateways, the PIGS interconnects users (user devices) who want to be offered multimedia services and Service Providers (SPs). Furthermore, our system dynamically offers differential services to multiple users with respect to the user, device and location characteristics. The PIGS also collects events using embedded sensors and generates events used for service configuration along with service predictions by using light-weight middleware. In this paper we implement real testbed, a house and a car, and verify the effectiveness of the service reconfiguration. The portable gateway structure using the PIGS achieves a 22% faster service response time in comparison to a fixed gateway-based structure.

Lightweight Middleware for Developing Ubiquitous Interfaces

Lightweight Middleware for Developing Ubiquitous Interfaces