FamiWare: a family of event-based middleware for ambient intelligence

Most of the middlewares currently available focus on one type of device (e.g., TinyOS sensors) and/or are designed with one requirement in mind (e.g., data management). This is an important limitation since most of the AmI applications work with several devices (such as sensors, smartphones or PDAs) and use a high diversity of low-level services. Ideally, the middleware should provide a single interface for accessing all those services able to work in heterogeneous devices. To address this issue, we propose a family of configurable middleware (FamiWare) with a really flexible architecture, instead of building a single version of a middleware with a rigid structure. In this work, we present the architecture of our middleware that can be configured, following a Software Product Line approach, in order to be instantiated in a particular device fulfilling specific application requirements. Furthermore, we evaluate that the decisions taken at architecture and implementation are the adequate ones for this kind of constrained devices.