Middleware for pervasive computing: A survey

The rapidly emerging area of pervasive computing faces many challenging research issues critical to application developers. Wide heterogeneity of hardware, software, and network resources pose veritable coordination problems and demand thorough knowledge of individual elements and technologies. In order to ease this problem and to aid application developers, different middleware platforms have been proposed by researchers. Though the existing middleware solutions are useful, they themselves have varied features and contribute partially, for context, data, or service management related application developments. There is no single middleware solution that can address a majority of pervasive computing application development issues, due to the diverse underlying challenges. In this survey paper, we identify different design dimensions of pervasive computing middleware and investigate their use in providing various system services. In-depth analysis of the system services have been carried out and middleware systems have been carefully studied. With a view to aid future middleware developers, we also identify some challenging open research issues that have received little or no attention in existing middleware solutions.