Towards an aspect-oriented reconfigurable middleware for pervasive systems: implementation and evaluation.

ABSTRACTPervasive systems need to be dynamically reconfigured in order to properly adapt to the changes that continuously occur in their environment. This is usually achieved by building these systems on top of a middleware platform that offers, among others, a context-monitoring service and a dynamic reconfiguration service. In this paper we evaluate the suitability of using Aspect-Oriented Software Development to provide dynamic adaptation at runtime. Concretely, we present the implementation and evaluation of our aspect-oriented middleware architecture, which allows the dynamic reconfiguration of both applications and middleware services by enabling or disabling optional functionalities or by replacing the services with lighter implementations. We have studied some related approaches and designed and implemented a case study in order to evaluate the execution and reconfiguration time. The results show that the overhead introduced by our platform is acceptable enough to use it in resource-constrained mobile devices.