Carlos André Guimarães Ferraz

Mires: a publish/subscribe middleware for sensor networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of a large number of small devices with computational power, wireless communication and sensing capability. These networks have been developed for a wide range of applications, such as habitat monitoring, object tracking, precision agriculture, building monitoring and military systems. Meanwhile, middleware systems have also been proposed in to facilitate both the development of these applications and provide common application services. The development of middleware for sensor networks, however, places new challenges on middleware developers due to the low availability of resources and processing capacity of the sensor nodes. In this context, this paper presents the design and implementation of a middleware for WSN named Mires. Mires incorporates characteristics of message-oriented middleware by allowing applications communicate in a publish/subscribe way. In order to illustrate the proposed middleware, we have also developed an environment-monitoring application and a data aggregation service.

A message-oriented middleware for sensor networks

The miniaturization of hardware components has lead to the development of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and networked-applications over them. Meanwhile, middleware systems have also been proposed in order to both facilitating the development of these applications and providing common application services. The development of middleware for sensor networks, however, places new challenges to middleware developers due to the low availability of resources and processing capacity of the sensor nodes. In this context, this paper presents a middleware for WSN named Mires. Mires incorporates characteristics of message-oriented middleware by allowing applications communicate in a publish/subscribe way. In order to illustrate the proposed middleware, we implement an aggregation middleware service for an environment-monitoring application.

Guidelines for performance evaluation of web services

The integration of heterogeneous systems has been an argued problem. Web Service is a new technology and it provides flexibility and interconnection between different distributed applications over the Internet and intranets. Currently there are several Web Services implementations, which differ in their implementation language, support for class binding, ease of use and performance. This paper presents guidelines for performance evaluation of Web Services toolkits. The guidelines were developed based on known Web Services performance bottlenecks. These guidelines can be used to choose the most appropriate toolkit to develop a high performance-demanding service. Experiments were carried out to apply the guidelines, and measure and compare the performance of two mostly-used Java Web Services toolkits -- Apache Axis and Sun Java Web Services Developer Pack (JWSDP). In addition to performance guidelines, recommendations on the use of SOAP features to guarantee interoperability between toolkits are given.

InterDOC: reference architecture for interoperable services in collaborative writing environments

Groups that work on cooperative applications frequently construct and provide documents. Although these environments manipulate the same kind of artifact (a document), they are not usually interoperable due to the implementation of different policies, protocols or infrastructure. Therefore, it is hard for users to use different collaborative systems to work on a single shared document and share several necessary information for the accomplishment of a collaborative authoring process that the involved tools offer separately. Towards such an interoperation, we propose the InterDOC (environment for supporting interoperability of collaborative document authoring tools) reference architecture and environment. Using InterDOC, a group of authors can write a document in their favorite environment and can then make this document available via InterDOC to another group of authors using another environment, or even a single user application. We use OMG MDA in order to obtain platform-independent reference architecture.

An architecture of services for session management and contents adaptation in ubiquitous medical environments

Advances in wireless technologies and mobile devices have made possible a wide range of efficient and powerful healthcare environments. Ubiquitous computing concepts meet healthcare principles, enabling physicians to connect to and use healthcare systems almost anytime, anywhere. This paper proposes a service architecture based on a context-aware middleware, which provides session management and content adaptation for ubiquitous medicine environments. By using simple applications on top of the proposed middleware services, associated physicians join a network of services, so called UHS (Ubiquitous Health Services) that provide ubiquitous access for its users from any point of the network, with different kinds of devices.

JWSPerf: A Performance Benchmarking Utility with Support to Multiple Web Services Implementations

Web Services have a variety of qualities, such as flexibility,simplicity,support communication through firewalls and provide interconnection between distributed applications over the Internet. However, the Web Services performance depends on the toolkit implementation and the choice of the SOAP payload transport protocol. It is necessary to investigate the performance limitations of Web Services implementations. The performance evaluation process can demand good amount of time, money and a developer with a good experience in the Web Services technology and toolkit. This paper presents an open source utility to automate the performance comparison of different Java Web Services toolkits. At this moment, JWSPerf utility supports three Java toolkits - Apache Axis, Sun Java Web Services Developer Pack and Systinet Server for Java. Beyond, a general-purpose benchmark was defined to compare the results and explore the influence of the complexity and the size of the data types.

A Model-driven Approach for MulSeMedia Application Domain

The MulSeMedia has been considered the great challenge of Multimedia for the next ten years. Aiming to stimulate other human sensory receptors such as mechanoreceptors, chemoreceptors and thermoceptors, the MulSeMedia increases the degree of immersion of users as well as improves the Quality of Experience and is standardized by MPEG-V. It is currently possible to identify a gap in the definition of processes, methods and tools to support the systematic development of multimedia /multisensory applications in accordance with the MPEG-V standard. The main objective of this work is to propose a Model-driven approach to integrate media, software and sensory effects projects. In this research, the thesis is argued that MDD can increase the productivity of the development of MulSeMedia applications, in particular those with such strong integration requirement with complex programming logic.

MulSeMaker: An MDD Tool for MulSeMedia Web Application Development

MulSeMedia applications aim to stimulate other human sensory receptors such as mechanoreceptors, chemoreceptors and thermoreceptors. They increase the degree of immersion of users as well as improve the Quality of Experience and are standardized by MPEG-V. It is currently possible to identify a gap in the definition of processes, methods and tools to support the systematic development of MulSeMedia applications. This paper presents a tool called MulSeMaker for the development of MulSeMedia applications in the Web domain. It was developed based on the application family concept from the Generative Software Development. In order to investigate evidence to confirm the benefits of the proposed tool, empirical studies were carried out to collect and analyze qualitative and quantitative data.

A policy-based coordination architecture for distributed complex event processing in the internet of things: doctoral symposium

The dissemination of powered communication devices has instigated a new technological paradigm called Internet of Things (IoT). These devices are present in our life, capturing information about peoples routines and using them as data stream to support many decision-making processes. Nevertheless, many IoT applications take into consideration only the information related to their local context and the data analysis is done by a cloud server, increasing the feedback information latency to the data consumers and reducing the information quality. This work adopts the use of a distributed complex event processing (CEP) to analyse data considering all the IoT devices to execute data processing and distribution through a policy-based coordination architecture, building a μDCEP, called GiTo. The policies define rules for coordination processing which are monitored through the distributed CEP engine. This approach focus on information quality improvement and time reduction between data generation and information acquired by the consumers.

Scenarios and Middleware Services for Pervasive Multiplatform Networked Games

This work in progress paper presents a particular view for future networked multiplayer games. In our point of view, these applications will include features from pervasive computing, allowing players to enjoy them using different devices, such as PDAs and mobile phones, almost anywhere, anytime. These games demand that the way each player interacts with the game must be adapted according to their context information, such as players location and device. In this document, we call these applications pervasive multiplayer multiplatform games (PM2G). We present scenarios that show intended characteristics for these games. Based on requirements extracted from our scenarios, we also propose five services that aims at allowing PM2Gs development and deployment