Section: Software

xSOM – Service-oriented middleware for the Future Internet

Participant : Nikolaos Georgantas [correspondent] .

Building on our long experience on service-oriented middleware (SOM) for pervasive environments (see §  5.3 above) and given the evolution of such environments towards the Future Internet and the Internet of Things, we have already implemented early results of our related research into an extensible SOM (xSOM) for the Future Internet. xSOM aims at enabling large-scale dynamic compositions of services and things, while being highly extensible for accommodating the extreme heterogeneity of such compositions. xSOM currently supports two major functionalities: (i) a protocol bus-based solution to seamless integration of heterogeneous interaction paradigms for services and things; and (ii) a solution to discovery, access and data fusion over large populations of things.

Regarding (i), we have introduced a protocol interoperability solution comprising representative abstract connector types for the client/server (CS), publish/subscribe (PS) and tuple space (TS) paradigms, as well as their mapping to a higher-level generic application (GA) connector type. We apply these connector abstractions to introduce an enhanced bus paradigm, the eXtensible Service Bus (XSB). XSB features richer interaction semantics than common Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) implementations and incorporates special consideration for semantics-preserving cross-integration of CS, PS and TS. We have carried out a realization of XSB —first on the PEtALS ESB, and then on EasyESB— where we provide templates for systematic and highly facilitated building of binding components for heterogeneous systems (services and things) that are plugged into the XSB. To demonstrate the applicability of our approach, we have implemented a smoke-detection-and-alert system integrating a JMEDS DPWS Web Service (CS), a JMS system based on Apache ActiveMQ (PS), and a Jini JavaSpaces system (TS).

Regarding (ii), we support data queries over large populations of things, notably smartphones, which are getting increasingly ubiquitous and embed a rich collection of sensors. xSOM enables: (i) high-level programming of things on top of heterogeneous smartphone sensors; (ii) thing discovery and access dealing with large numbers of networked things; and (iii) on-the-fly composition of such things and fusion of their data in response to queries. In target settings, e.g., at the scale of a city, not all phones need to register for reporting their data (e.g., ambient sound level); some smartly distributed sampling is sufficient. This enables efficient scalable coverage of the entire city with only a subset of the large phone population being registered. The phone's things registration manager includes a probabilistic decision algorithm for selective registration based on the truncated Lévy walk mobility model. The registration decision is based on the actual density of already registered phones, the coverage quality requirements, and the coverage of the estimated path that the user will take for the next few minutes. We have implemented a demonstrative application enabling a user to know “how lively is this city spot at this moment' based on retrieving and aggregating smartphone ambient sound level data.

Our software will soon be released under open source license as part of the newly launched OW2 initiative on “Future Internet of Software Services" (http://www.ow2.org/view/Future_Internet/ ).