LighTS: a lightweight, customizable tuple space supporting context-aware applications

ABSTRACT

The tuple space model inspired by Linda has recently been rediscovered by distributed middleware. Moreover, some researchers also applied it in the challenging scenarios involving mobility and more specifically context-aware computing. Context information can be stored in the tuple space, and queried like any other data.Nevertheless, it turns out that conventional tuple space implementations fall short of expectations in this new domain. On one hand, many of the available systems provide a wealth of features, which make the resulting implementation unnecessarily bloated and incompatible with the tight resource constraints typical of this field. Moreover, the traditional Linda matching semantics based on value equality are not appropriate for context-aware computing, where queries are often formulated over value ranges, and where there is a prominent need to deal with imprecise information coming from multiple sources.In this paper, we describe a new tuple space implementation called LIGHTS. Originally developed as the tuple space core of the LIME [11] system, LIGHTS provides a flexible framework that makes it easy to introduce extensions to the tuple space and in general to customize the tuple space implementation. The design and programming interface of LIGHTS is presented, and its flexibility demonstrated by illustrating extensions that proved useful in the development of context-aware applications.

REFERENCES

• 1: www.almaden. ibm.com/cs/TSpaces.
• 2: www.sun.com/software/jini/specs/jinil.2html/js-title.html.
• 3: www.gigaspaces.com.
• 4: lights.sourceforge.net.
• 5: lime.sourceforge.net.
• 6: Giacomo Cabri , Letizia Leonardi , Franco Zambonelli, MARS: A Programmable Coordination Architecture for Mobile Agents, IEEE Internet Computing, v.4 n.4, p.26-35, July 2000 [doi>10.1109/4236.865084 ]
• 7: Nicholas Carriero , David Gelernter , Lenore D. Zuck, Bauhaus Linda, Selected papers from the ECOOP'94 Workshop on Models and Languages for Coordination of Parallelism and Distribution, Object-Based Models and Languages for Concurrent Systems, p.66-76, July 05, 1994
• 8: David Gelernter, Generative communication in Linda, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.7 n.1, p.80-112, Jan. 1985 [doi>10.1145/2363.2433]
• 9: George J. Klir , Ute St. Clair , Bo Yuan, Fuzzy set theory: foundations and applications, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1997
• 10: A. L. Murphy and G. P. Picco. Using Coordination Middleware for Location-Aware Computing: A LIME Case Study. In Proc. of the 6th Int. Conf. on Coordination Models and Languages (COORD04), LNCS 2949, pages 263--278. Springer, February 2004.
• 11: LIME: A Middleware for Physical and Logical Mobility, Proceedings of the The 21st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, p.524, April 16-19, 2001
• 12: Rocco de Nicola , Gian Luigi Ferrari , Rosario Pugliese, KLAIM: A Kernel Language for Agents Interaction and Mobility, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.24 n.5, p.315-330, May 1998 [doi>10.1109/32.685256 ]
• 13: Andrea Omicini , Franco Zambonelli, Tuple centres for the coordination of Internet agents, Proceedings of the 1999 ACM symposium on Applied computing, p.183-190, February 28-March 02, 1999, San Antonio, Texas, United States [doi>10.1145/298151.298231]
• 14: Antony Rowstron, WCL: A co-ordination language for geographically distributed agents, World Wide Web, v.1 n.3, p.167-179, 1998 [doi>10.1023/A:1019263731139 ]