Design and Implementation of a Middleware for Development and Provision of Stream-Based Services

This paper proposes MISSA, a novel middleware to facilitate the development and provision of stream-based services in emerging pervasive environments. The stream-based services utilize voluminous and continuously updated data streams as their input. The characteristics of data streams bring new requirements on the development and provision of the services. To satisfy the requirements, a unique service model and a runtime system are designed in MISSA. The key concept of our service model is to separate service logic from handling data streams. This significantly mitigates the burden on service developers by allowing them to only concentrate on the service logic. Job of handling data streams is completely delegated to the runtime. In this paper, we first present the importance of stream-based services and their requirements. Also, we describe a best route finding service as an example to motivate the need for MISSA. Then, we envision overall architecture for provisioning of stream-based services and detail our design of service model and runtime. Lastly, we demonstrate the efficiency of service model and runtime through experiments.

I Introduction

Due to advances in wireless communication and embedded device technologies, many useful data are generated and collected in various ways. Among them, continuous data streams generated by electronic devices such as sensors, RFID readers, and GPS devices are corning into the spotlight. This opens up new opportunities to provide value-added stream-based services in diverse application domains, e.g., location-based services (LBS), intelligent transportation services (ITS), intelligent logistics services, environmental monitoring, medical monitoring services, and so on [18] [22] [23]. For example, a service which provides traffic status exploits a large amount of data streams generated by traffic sensors deployed on the road or devices equipped in vehicles. Also, a child tracking or friend finder service is based on continuously changing location information.