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Salminen T (2005)
Lightweight middleware architecture for mobile phones.
M.Sc. thesis, Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of Oulu, Finland.

Ubiquitous computing, context-aware applications and mobile services form one of the most promising business opportunities in the near future. Ubiquitous applications, however, introduce great challenges to application developers. The application area includes several demanding characteristics. The applications are mobile and operate in distributed environments. They communicate in wireless fashion using currently available communication interfaces, adapt to the situation at hand, and are aware of their context and any changes in it. To reduce the application developers’ overload and to enable wide-scale application development, the developers need to be provided with a middleware or a platform, which offers the services common to the application area. In order to utilize the architecture in resource-constrained devices, such as in mobile phones, it also has to be lightweight besides being capable of generic use. In this thesis, a lightweight middleware architecture is implemented to support the development of ubiquitous applications for mobile phones. The work is based on the CAPNET architecture, developed in the CAPNET research program at the University of Oulu. This thesis presents the characteristics of the application area in question and the requirements that the ubiquitous applications set to a middleware architecture. A requirement analysis is carried out by an extensive literature review. The purpose of this work is to refine the architecture to better reach the requirements that are typical to this application area, and to implement the architecture on Symbian operating system. The architecture was validated by developing several application prototypes on top of it and using the applications in a ubiquitous test environment. The validation proved the middleware architecture as functional and verified its applicability to resource-constrained distributed mobile computing environments, since the implemented middleware resulted in an overall size of less than 50 KB.

Full paper (PDF)