A reflective framework for discovery and interaction in heterogeneous mobile environments

Abstract

To operate in dynamic and potentially unknown environments a mobile client must first discover the local services that match its requirements, and then interact with these services to obtain the application functionality. However, high levels of heterogeneity characterize mobile environments; that is, contrasting discovery protocols including SLP, UPnP and Jini, and different styles of service interaction paradigms e.g. Remote Procedure Call, Publish-Subscribe and agent based solutions. Therefore given this type of heterogeneity, utilizing single discovery and interaction systems is not optimal as the client will only be able to use the services available to that particular platform. Hence, in this paper we present an adaptive middleware solution to this problem. ReMMoC is a Web-Services based reflective middleware that allows mobile clients to be developed independently of both discovery and interaction mechanisms. We describe the architecture, which dynamically reconfigures to match the current service environment. Finally, we investigate the incurred performance overhead such dynamic behaviour brings to the discovery and interaction process.