Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become essential components for a variety of environmental, surveillance, military, traffic control, and healthcare applications. These applications face critical challenges such as communication, security, power consumption, data aggregation, heterogeneities of sensor hardware, and Quality of Service (QoS) issues. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a so...

Service Oriented architectures are becoming very popular to meet the requirements of complex current applications demanding distribution and heterogeneity in open environments. The loose coupling provides reusability and interoperability, avoiding platform dependencies and saving time and development costs. The iLAND-ARTEMIS project goes a step further aiming at the development of a service-bas...

This paper investigates the application of SOA principles for integrating embedded devices features, typically operating in ubiquitous computing environments, with enterprise-level services and business processes. Under this perspective, we present the SAI – Service Application Integration – system as a working example of a message-oriented middleware supporting context-aware application develo...

One of the problems of middleware for shared state is that they are designed, explicitly or implicitly, for symmetric networks. However, since the Internet is not symmetric, end-to-end process connectivity cannot be guaranteed. Our solution to this is to provide the middleware with a network abstraction layer that masks the asymmetry of the network and provides the illusion of a symmetric netwo...

Enforcing DRM in collaborative, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks comprising different types of user devices is a challenging task as it is difficult to monitor the network operations in a P2P network that is not governed by any rules. In such a scenario, efficient revenue generation for the content service providers for distributed content, prevention of unauthorized copying and distribution, and ma...

This paper addresses the design and implementation of thin coordination veneers for use in the development of applications over ad hoc wireless networks. A coordination veneer is defined as an adaptation layer that customizes a general-purpose coordination middleware to a particular domain with minimal development effort. This technique allows developers to build highly-tailored coordination mo...

In this report we investigate what are the main concepts and issues in the support of Quality of Service, focusing at open distributed computing and middleware platforms. We study how these issues are being addressed in research on QoS support related to middleware. QoS is about non-functional properties in general, but research has been centred around communication protocols and multimedia. Th...