Smart Service Architecture for Small Devices

One of the most basic requirements in software architectures for pervasive computing is the ability to adapt to changes. Although there is an increasing number of applications for small devices such as mobile telephones, the software used is still very restricted in terms of its functionality and flexibility. For instance, today mobile phones comes typically with pre-installed with software and can be extended by the user only with simple games or sounds. In this paper, we present a middleware platform, with a very small footprint, for mobile devices. The purpose of the platform is to allow runtime adaptation and reconfiguration of the applications running on small devices. In the paper we discuss the platform and illustrate its potential by describing a Bluetooth based SMS service implemented on commercial mobile phones. This SMS service is a location dependent service provided dynamically. Mobile phones entering our campus acquire all the necessary software dynamically and transparently. Once the adaptation is complete, SMS messages are re-routed over Bluetooth to a free SMS-Gateway so that the mobile phone does not need to use the GSM network. This test case illustrates the ability provided by the platform to adapt the software running on small devices as well as its potential as an infrastructure for location dependent services.