Middleware Infrastructures for Self-organising Pervasive Computing Systems

In this chapter, we focus on the need for innovative open pervasive middleware infrastructures to support self-organisation, self-adaptation and evolvability, in distributed applications, with a particular attention to pervasive computing scenarios. We discuss how such middleware infrastructures should be at the basis of a nature-inspired architectural approach to system design, enabling the modelling and the deployment of services as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices interacting with one another. A reference conceptual architecture is presented to clarify the concepts expressed and the role of middleware within it, and several possible approaches to realise the idea are surveyed and critically analysed, also with the help of a simple case study. Two concrete examples of middleware infrastructures—namely the TOTA (Tuples On The Air) middleware supporting a physically-inspired computing model and the TuCSoN (Tuple Centres over the Network) middleware supporting a chemical-inspired one—are detailed along with examples showing how to use such infrastructures.