Off-The-Shelf Ready To Go middleware for self-reconfiguring and self-optimizing ubiquitous computing applications

In ubiquitous and pervasive scenarios, a plethora of differentiated software and hardware components interoperate wirelessly and seamlessly to make users able to continuously access services and contents while roaming, with the aim of getting always the best out of their current environment and available resources. We claim that there is the need for flexible and general solutions for continuous runtime self-reconfiguration and self-optimization of off-the-shelf components, viewed as services, from both functional and non-functional perspectives. The paper proposes a fully reconfigurable middleware approach inspired to a non-conventional architecture pattern; our middleware can extend also already existing and non-reconfigurable middleware/applications easily and flexibly, with no need to re-design them. The proposed design principles have been practically applied in the implementation of a runtime self-reconfigurable middleware called Off-The-Shelf Ready To Go (OTS-RTG), implemented on top of iPOJO. The reported experimental results both exhibit a limited overhead and show the wide applicability of the proposed solution to many application scenarios.