CAMID: architectural support of middleware for multiple‑domain ubiquitous computing and IoT

Abstract

Current Internet of Things (IoT) systems concentrate on one domain, such as smart home, university, office, etc., while many entities such as humans and mobile phones are mobile entities, roaming between different IoT domains. Most of the research on context-aware middleware for IoT addresses a specific domain and limited kinds of applications. Realizing the ultimate intelligence and automation in IoT will need a multiple-domain system. The architectural design of a multiple-domain context-aware middleware for IoT and pervasive computing envisages serious challenges, including extensibility of the environment, need for distribution, resource limitation of mobile devices, mobility, and need for unique name allocation, which have not been fully addressed by related studies. This paper proposes the architectural design of a multiple-domain context-aware middleware (CAMID), which uses a distributed two-layer architecture to handle the above issues. CAMID has been developed in Java in two layers, including H-CAMID and L-CAMID. Scenario-based Architecture Analysis Method (SAAM) shows that CAMID satisfies the target quality attributes and outperforms previous multiple-domain solutions. Finally, an experimental evaluation of CAMID shows acceptable response time in a critical scenario.