This project builds on significant previous research and experience from the partner institutions in the areas of Grid computing, middleware and mobile/ ubiquitous computing.

Lancaster University

Lancaster has a long history of involvement in middleware research. The Next Generation Middleware Group pioneered research in reflective middleware in the Sumo and Open ORB projects in the early 90’s and then applied this approach to mobile computing in the Adapt project from 1996-98. Since then we have focused, under the “OpenCOM” banner [Coulson,02], [Blair,04], on the development of lightweight middleware technologies that maximise deploy-time configurability and runtime re-configurability. The three cornerstones of the OpenCOM approach are components, reflection, and component frameworks. Our (minimal) component technology provides lightweight building-blocks for constructing systems by composition (as advocated for example by Szyperski [Szyperski,98]). Reflection then provides means to discover the structure and behaviour of component compositions, and to adapt and extend these at runtime.

Finally, component frameworks have the role of imposing domain-specific structure on component compositions and ensuring architectural integrity during periods of adaptation. The OpenCOM approach is currently being applied in a diverse set of application domains, including programmable networking (the EPSRC-funded NETKIT project), overlay networks (the Open Overlays project), web services, mobile computing, sentient/ global computing, digital libraries and distributed multimedia applications.

Lancaster's middleware group is also working on a generic component-based Grid middleware called GRIDKIT [Grace,04], which is entirely composed of component frameworks. GRIDKIT relies on plug-in overlay components hosted in component frameworks to provide a variety of interaction patterns. more than the conventional service-oriented architiectures. Though initally intended for generating various middleware personalities for the Grid, GRIDKIT is rapidly becoming an adaptive component-based general-purpose middleware platform for instantiating different families of middleware.

University College London

UCLhas a long history of involvement in the area of context awareness and mobile middleware. The EPSRC-funded Promile project used principles of context-awareness and adaptation to support reconfiguration of the constituent components of a fixed network router [Rio,01]. In the Zuhlke Engineering-funded CARISMA project the focus has been on enhancing adaptation by providing a flow of information (context-awareness) from the lower layers to the application layer and vice-versa [Capra,02], [Gold,01]. In line with this approach, the EPSRC-funded Satin project concentrates on the use of mobile code to facilitate the reconfiguration of components in a mobile middleware environment.

With Philips, we are researching how context information, such as the power constraints of mobile devices, can influence ad-hoc medium access and routing protocols and how such protocols can be optimised. Of central importance to the present bid is UCL’s work in the IST-funded Trusted and QoS-Aware Provision of Application Services project (TAPAS) project. This project has developed expertise and tool support for model-driven architecture (MDA)-based development. In particular, the semantics of the TAPAS service level agreement (SLA) language have been defined following the model-denotational semantics approach that was developed for UML [Skene,04a]; and the TAPAS SLA was then implemented following MDA principles by using a transformation engine [Skene,04b].

Related Publications

[Arshad,03] Arshad, U., Mascolo, C., Mellor, M., “Exploiting Mobile Computing in Health-care, Demo Session of 3rd Intl Workshop on Smart Appliances (co-located with ICDCS03), Providence, USA, May 2003.
[Blair,04] Blair, G., Coulson, G., Grace, P., “Research Directions in Reflective Middleware: the Lancaster Experience”, In Proc. 3rd Workshop on Reflective and Adaptive Middleware (RM2004) co-located with Middleware 2004, Toronto, Canada, Oct 2004.
[Capra,02] Capra, L., Blair, G., Mascolo, C., Emmerich, W., Grace, P., “Exploiting Reflection in Mobile Computing Middleware”, ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review, Vol 6, No 4, pp34-44, 2002.
[Capra03] Capra, L., W. Emmerich, W., C. Mascolo, C., “CARISMA: Context-Aware middleware System for Mobile Applications”, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol 29, No 10, pp929-945, Nov 2003.
[Chin,04] Chin, J., Coveney, P.V, “Towards Tractable Toolkits for the Grid: a Plea for Lightweight, Usable Middleware”, RealityGrid NeSC Technical Report UKeS-2004-01, February 2004.
[Coulson,02] Coulson, G., Blair, G., Clarke, M., Parlavantzas, N., “The Design of a Highly Configurable and Reconfigurable Middleware Platform”, ACM/ Springer Distributed Computing Journal, Vol 15, No 2, pp109–126, Apr 2002.
[Davies,04] Davies, N., Friday, A., Oliver Storz, O., “Exploring the Grid’s Potential for Ubiquitous Computing”, IEEE Pervasive Computing, Vol 3, No 2, 2004; see also: http://ubigrid.lancs.ac.uk
[DTNRG,04] The Delay Tolerant Networking Research Group, http://www.dtnrg.org/, 2004.
[Flechais,03] Flechais, I., Sasse, M. A.  & Hailes, S. M. V. Bringing Security Home: A Process for Developing Secure and Usable Systems. ACM/SIGSAC New Security Paradigms Workshop, Switzerland, August 2003.
[Flechais,04] Flechais, I., Sasse, M. A & Mascolo, C. Integrating Security and Usability into the Requirements and Design Process Ivan Flechais, Cecilia Mascolo and Angela Sasse UCL Research Note. Submitted for Publication.
[Fleury,03] Keynote address by Marc Fleury at IFIP/ ACM Middleware ’03, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2003.
[Furmento,02] Furmento, N., Mayer, A., McGough, S., Newhouse, S., Field, T., Darlington, J., “ICENI: Optimisation of Component Applications within a Grid Environment”, Parallel Computing, Vol 28, No 12, pp 1753-1772, 02.
[Gold,01] Gold R., Mascolo, C., “Use of Context-Awareness in Mobile Peer-to-Peer Networks”, Proc. 8th IEEE Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed Computing Systems (FTDCS’2001), IEEE Computer Society Press, 2001.
[Grace,04] Grace, P., Coulson, G., Blair, G., Mathy, L., Yeung, W.K., Cai, W, Duce, D., Cooper, C., “GRIDKIT: Pluggable Overlay Networks for Grid Computing”, to appear Proc. Distributed Objects and Applications (DOA’04), Cyprus, Oct 2004.
[Harbird,04] Harbird, R., Hailes, S., Mascolo, C., “Adaptive Resource Discovery for Ubiquitous Computing”, Proc. 2nd Intl Workshop on Middleware for Pervasive and Ad-Hoc Computing (co-located with Middleware 04). Toronto. ACM Press. Oct 04.
[IBM,03] IBM Systems Journal, Special Issue on Autonomic Computing, Vol. 42, No. 1, 2003.
[Kon,02] Kon, F., Costa, F., Blair, G.S., Campbell, R., “The Case for Reflective Middleware: Building middleware that is flexible, reconfigurable, and yet simple to use”, CACM Vol 45, No 6, 2002.
[Mascolo,02] Mascolo, C., Capra, L., Emmerich, W., “Middleware for Mobile Computing (A Survey)”. In Advanced Lectures on Networking, Vol 2497 of LNCS, p20-58, Springer Verlag, May 2002.
[Rio,01] Rio, M., Pezzi, N., Zanolin, L., de Meer, H, Emmerich, W., Mascolo, C., “Promile: A Management Architecture for Programmable Modular Routers”, Proc. OPENSIG 2001 Workshop on Next Generation Network Programming, Sept 2001.
[Schmid,02] Schmid, S. “A Component-based Active Router Architecture”, PhD Thesis, Lancaster University, 2002.
[Skene,04a] Skene, J., Lamanna, D., Emmerich, W., “Precise Service Level Agreements”, Proc. 26th Intl Conference on Software Engineering, Edinburgh, UK, pp179-188, IEEE Computer Society Press, May 2004.
[Skene,04b] Skene, J., Emmerich, W., “Generating a Contract Checker for an SLA Language”, Proc. EDOC 2004 Workshop on Contract Architectures and Languages, Monterey, California, IEEE Computer Society Press, 2004.
[Szyperski,98] Szyperski, C., “Component Software: Beyond Object-Oriented Programming”, Addison-Wesley, 1998.
[Taïani ,03] Taïani F. et al. Towards Implementing Multi-Layer Reflection for Fault-Tolerance, Proc. of the Int. Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks 2003, San Francisco, CA, pp.435-444. IEEE Computer Society Press. 2003.
[Valdes,04] Valdes, A. et al. An architecture for an adaptive intrusion-tolerant server. LNCS 2845, In: B.Christianson, B.Crispo, JA.Malcom, M.Roe, (eds.) Proc. of the 10th International Workshop on Security Protocols. Springer, 2004, pp.158-178
[Wokoma,02] Wokoma I., Liabotis I., Prnjat O., Sacks L., Marshall I. “A Weakly Coupled Adaptive Gossip Protocol for Application Level Active Networks”, IEEE Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks, June 2002.