Mobile Computing Middleware
sunday, may 19, 14.15-18.00

Mobile computing devices such as PDAs, laptops, cameras and mobile phones impose new requirements for middleware platforms. These devices face temporary loss of network connectivity when they roam; they need to discover other mobile devices in an ad hoc manner; they are likely to have scarce resources, such as battery lifetime, processing power and memory; they are required to react to frequent and unannounced changes in the environment, such as high variability of network bandwidth, new physical locations, and so on.

The recent popularity of these devices, however, opens the door for new distributed applications and service provision: in particular, ad hoc groups and intermitted connectivity become more and more used. For building these novel applications, engineers should be able to rely on a suitable middleware.

This tutorial will discuss the requirement of mobile computing, and the emerging call for context and environment awareness for applications. The tutorial will briefly discuss standard middleware principles to then provide a conceptual framework for the art mobile computing middleware. The tutorial will use this framework to describe some earlier examples of middleware for mobile computing, which targeted a specific domain, introduce tuple-based systems, and context-aware middleware.

The tutorial will also provide common characteristics of mobile computing middleware and outline the open issues and the future directions of the research in this field.

Cecilia Mascolo

Dept. Computer Science
University College London
Gower St. WC1E 6BT London, UK
Email: c.mascolo@cs.ucl.ac.uk

Cecilia Mascolo is a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science, University College London. She holds an MSc and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bologna. She has published extensively in the areas of software engineering, mobile computing, mobile code, ad-hoc and active networks. Cecilia is also interested in the use of mark-up languages for mobile computing applications.

She has delivered tutorials on Mobile Computing Middleware (an instance of the tutorial was delivered at the International Conference on Middleware 2001) and on XML. She is principal investigator in British funded projects on "Use of Mobile Code for Mobile Computing Middleware", "Mobile Computing Middleware in Health-Care" and co-investigator in a programmable network project. Before joining UCL, she spent one academic year as a visiting academic at Washington University in St. Louis (MO, USA) working on fine-grained mobility.

Cecilia is a member of the ACM and of the IEEE Computer Society.