Common Contracts

Design and run-time bandwidth contracts for pervasive computing middleware

April 20th, 2003

• Filed
  April 20th, 2003

An important requirement for pervasive computing applications is to inform their middleware about the resources they need in order to perform their tasks. In this paper, we give our vision about the use of resource contracts in pervasive systems. After giving a state of the art description about the SEESCOA architecture and the Quality Objects framework, we propose the use of design and run-time contracts on the software components composing an application. These contracts must be agreed upon by the middleware before the components can be deployed and they must be monitored constantly during application execution. As an example case, we describe how bandwidth contracts can be used in a concrete scenario.