Foundations of a generic framework for Distributed Applications

With the increasing diversity of today's applications, there is a need for a generic middleware that can enable the interoperability between traditional legacy systems and recent mobile and embedded applications. In addition, this middleware should support a diverse set of Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, as well as location awareness and dynamic reconfiguration of wireless/mobile applications - issues that are not addressed by existing middleware solutions. We propose a generic framework that enables the communication between applications running under different middleware solutions and that supports the specification and enforcement of QoS requirements. This paper is the result of an initial investigation into the requirements for such a framework and possible approaches towards its implementation.