Present Scenarios and Future Challenges in Pervasive Middleware

In order to run application on pervasive devices, pervasive middleware has to support context-awareness, as pervasive applications need to adapt to variations of context of execution (such as network bandwidth, battery power and screen size), physical change of locations, change of technological artifacts (devices), change of hardware resources of artifacts, and so on. Recent research efforts have primarily focused on designing new mobile middleware systems capable of supporting the requirements imposed by mobility. However, apart from mobility constraint, pervasive middleware will operate under above-mentioned conditions of a radical change. This change is varying from physical components (like network heterogeneity) to functional components (right from heterogeneous devices to context-based applications). Few contemporary researches have indeed focused on some parts of these requirements; but a qualitative difference between intended requirements and practical achievements still remains there. In this article, we discuss some of recent mobile/pervasive middleware systems, focusing on research issues and challenges ahead to bridge the gap. Typically, we highlight the key characteristics of pervasive middleware to support context awareness and service discovery, smartness and adaptation, heterogeneity and integration, and intelligent interfacing