WComp, Middleware for Ubiquitous Computing and System Focused Adaptation

Ubiquitous computing relies on computers present everywhere, at any times and in any things. Indeed with recent years advance in mobile communication technologies and the miniaturization of computer hardware, processing units are becoming invisible and a part of the environment. Middlewares for ubiquitous computing have to manage three main features specific to their environment: devices’ mobility, devices’ heterogeneity and environment’s dynamicity. The devices’ mobility, due to motion of users and their associated devices, forbids to assume that entities are known and will always be available. The second concept, entity’s heterogeneity, outlines the diversity between devices’ capabilities and functionalities provided by new smart objects. Finally, the environment high dynamicity illustrates the ubiquitous world entropy with the appearance and disappearance of devices. Devices used to create applications are thus unknown before discovering them. Then, ubiquitous computing must deal with such a dynamic software environment (called software infrastructure afterwards). As a result, future ubiquitous computing architectures must take into account those three constraints to solve ubiquitous computing challenges. Our model of middleware WComp is based on three parts: a software infrastructure, a service composition architecture, and a compositional adaptation mechanism.