DASIMA: A Flexible Management Middleware in Multi-Scale Contexts

Tiny devices, smart objects, home gateways, sensor networks, have become an integral part of our everyday life and of our socio-economic ecosystem. However their large number, their distribution and their volatility and heterogeneity make their management fiendishly complex. Traditional management systems, that are mainly ad-hoc or centralized, reach their limits in such complex management contexts. This paper introduces our response to overcome these difficulties by proposing a flexible management middleware for multi-scale contexts. This middleware named DASIMA, implements a new approach combining domain-based and architecture-based management. DASIMA is a fully component-based management middleware intended to scale-up and down according to the number and the distribution of managed resources. This proposal breaks with current management paradigms mainly related to quite rigid and monolithic systems. DASIMA has been experimented in a real industrial application in the Machine to Machine (M2M) context. These experiments confirm the interest of developing adaptable middleware to manage networked systems in multi-scale contexts.