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Multi-device application middleware: leveraging the ubiquity of the Web with webinos

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Abstract

The broad range of connected devices has turned the Internet into a ubiquitous concept. In addition to desktop and laptop PCs, the Internet currently connects mobile devices, home entertainment systems, and even in-car units. From this ubiquitous evolution towards sensor-rich devices, the opportunity arises for various new types of innovative software application. However, alongside rises the issue of managing the increasing diversity of device characteristics and capabilities. As device fragmentation grows, application developers are facing the need to cover a wider variety of target devices and usage scenarios. In result, maintaining a viable balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be an important challenge when developing applications for a ubiquitous ecosystem. In this article, we present the webinos platform, a distributed Web runtime platform that leverages the Web for supporting self-adaptive cross-device applications. In order to enable the development of such immersive ubiquitous applications, we introduce and evaluate the concept of a context-aware federated overlay architecture.

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Acknowledgements

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-ICT-2009-5, Objective 1.2) under grant agreement number 257103 (webinos project) and number 258348.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Technology, Ghent University – iMinds, Ghent, Belgium

    Heiko Desruelle & Frank Gielen

  2. BMW Forschung und Technik GmbH, Munich, Germany

    Simon Isenberg

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    John Lyle

Authors
  1. Heiko Desruelle
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  2. Simon Isenberg
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  3. John Lyle
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  4. Frank Gielen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Heiko Desruelle.

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Desruelle, H., Isenberg, S., Lyle, J. et al. Multi-device application middleware: leveraging the ubiquity of the Web with webinos. J Supercomput 66, 4–20 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-013-0901-3

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