CREAM: Coordination and Reliability Mechanisms for Adaptive Mobile Middleware

The number of mobile phones in Europe is higher than the number of personal computers. The number of devices surrounding our daily life, including tiny sensors, is rising exponentially. However, the software and communication mechanisms used to network these devices are still the ones that we have been devised 30 years ago for standard computer systems. Mobile networks are by orders of magnitude more dynamic than traditional systems and have often less resources (energy, memory, bandwidth). This calls for a radical change in the communication mechanisms applied. The proposed work will devise novel mechanisms for the communication among networked mobile devices. These mechanisms will have to combine spatial and temporal concerns in order to be able to cope with the dynamicity and the resource limitations of mobile systems. To understand and reason about these concerns, we will investigate their formal underpinning through appropriate calculi. Reliable communication is usually very expensive in terms of resources but sometimes needed: we will devise new techniques for obtaining different levels of reliability through dynamic prediction of network behaviour. New methods for collecting and sharing data will be designed, including novel adaptive transactions, which adjust to the variability of the network and to the resources available. We will evaluate the appropriateness of these mechanisms in small scale applications and in large scale simulations.