Autonomic- Components: Reflective Middleware for Location-Aware Behavior Adaptation

Abstract

Today mobile computing is pervasively taking over the traditional desktop computing. Mobile devices are characterized by abrupt and un-announced changes in execution context. The applications running on these devices need to be autonomous and thus dynamically adapt according to the changing context and can be customized to fit into devices ranging from PDAs and sensors to powerful desktops and mini-computers. Existing middleware support for the typical distributed applications is strictly based on component technology. Future mobile applications require highly dynamic and adaptive services from the middleware components i.e. autonomic adaptation. Traditional middleware do not address this emerging need of wide ranges of mobile applications mainly because of their monolithic and inflexible nature. It is hypothesized that such application adaptation can be achieved through meta-level protocols that can reflect and change the state and behaviors of the system. We integrate Component technology with our active Meta Object Protocols in Location-driven Reflective-middleware for Autonomic Applications. This paper implements the application adaptation service of this middleware. It specializes the concept of Meta Object Protocols for autonomic adaptation of mobile applications. ActiveMOP provide robust and highly flexible framework for autonomic component development for mobile applications. It proved to be a very simple and powerful way to programmatically develop location-driven applications based on autonomic components.