Building Adaptable Mobile Middleware Services Using Logical Mobility Techniques

In recent years, various mobile middleware systems have been developed that build on top of the protocol stack provided by the underlying network operating system, to offer a set of higher level services. Common services provided include remote procedure calls, data sharing, service discovery etc. With the number of mobile devices, such as PDAs, mobile phones or smart phones increasing, as well as the impeding flourishing of embedded and wearable computing, the role of middleware in offering services that hide the complexity in the underlying environment is at the same time important and complex. The mobile environment is becoming highly dynamic, with very heterogeneous devices, in terms of both hardware and software, forming short lived ad hoc networks. In this chapter, we argue that the provision of static services cannot tackle the peculiarities of this environment. We present logical mobility as a technique for dynamic adaptation, detail a specification of a framework that offers its flexible use, and present a number of dynamic middleware services, which can be intelligently acquired by a device at runtime.