Current advances in portable devices, wireless technologies, and distributed systems have created a mobile computing environment that is characterized by a large scale of dynamism. Diversities in network connectivity, platform capability, and resource availability can significantly affect the application performance. Traditional middleware systems, like CORBA and DCOM, have achieved great success in dealing with the heterogeneity in the underlying hardware and software platforms, offering portability, and facilitating development of distributed applications. However, they are not prepared to offer proper support for addressing the dynamic aspects of mobile systems. Modern distributed applications need a middleware that is capable of adapting to environment changes and that supports the required level of quality of service.

We are currently investigating various middleware paradigms for mobile applications. Our technical report A Survey of Middleware Paradigms for Mobile Computing (SCE-03-16) describes in detail a large number of middleware platforms and our evaluation of the state-of-the-art in that field.