Middleware for Protocol-Based Coordination in Mobile Applications

In distributed mobile applications, component interaction is complicated by dynamics in the environment. In mobile applications, nodes continuously come and go and change interaction partners, complicating this exchange. For protocol-based coordination, existing middleware approaches - such as publish/subscribe systems or tuplespaces-based systems - support the initial interaction partner discovery, but don´t support interaction partner maintenance over prolonged interaction sessions or easy protocol modularization. We propose extending these middleware approaches with suitable abstractions to better support protocol-based interaction in mobile applications. To test our approach, we created ObjectPlaces, a middleware that uses roles as its main abstraction. ObjectPlaces middleware supports the development of interaction protocols in dynamic, mobile environments to facilitate component coordination