Dynamic reconfiguration in the RUNES middleware

Coulson, Geoffrey and Gold, Richard and Lad, Manish and Mascolo, Cecilia and Mottola, Luca and Picco, Gian Pietro and Zachariadis, Stefanos (2006) Dynamic reconfiguration in the RUNES middleware. In: 2006 IEEE International Conference on Mobile Adhoc and Sensor Systems (MASS) :. IEEE, Vancouver, pp. 534-537. ISBN 978-1-4244-0506-0

Abstract

Next generation embedded systems will be composed of large numbers of heterogeneous devices. These will typically be resource-constrained (such as sensor motes), will use different operating systems, and will be connected through different types of network interfaces. Additionally, they may be mobile and/or form ad-hoc networks with their peers, and will need to be adaptive to changing conditions based on context-awareness. As an example of these system we consider disaster recovery scenarios where large numbers of different devices need to interconnect in an ad-hoc manner. In this respect, our goal is the provisioning of a middleware framework for such system environments. Our approach is based on a small and efficient middleware kernel supporting highly modularised and customisable component-based middleware services. These services can be tailored for specific embedded environments, and are runtime-reconfigurable to support adaptivity. This paper describes a demonstration that highlights some of the features available in our middleware. In particular, we focus on heterogeneity handling by showing our middleware running on resource-rich as well as resource-constrained devices, and on adaptivity features by demonstrating runtime reprogramming and on-the-fly component deployment.