Programming Pervasive and Mobile Computing Applications: the TOTA Approach

Pervasive and mobile computing call for suitable middleware and programming models to supportthe activities of complex software systems in dynamic network environments. In this paper wepresent TOTA (“Tuples On The Air”), a novel middleware and programming approach for sup-porting adaptive context-aware activities in pervasive and mobile computing scenarios. The keyidea in TOTA is to rely on spatially distributed tuples, adaptively propagated across a networkon the basis of application-specific rules, for both representing contextual information and sup-porting uncoupled interactions between application components. TOTA promotes a simple wayof programming that facilitates access to distributed information, navigation in complex environ-ments, and achievement of complex coordination tasks in a fully distributed and adaptive way,mostly freeing programmers and system managers from the need to take care of low-level issuesrelated to network dynamics. This paper includes both application examples to clarify conceptsand performance figures to show the feasibility of the approach