Tidal News: Motivation and Relevance
Inter-system communication plays a central role in the vision of Future Internet. It is particularly relevant to Internet of Things that is characterized by enormous scale, heterogeneity of participating communication entities, dynamic changes in the amount of available resources, and inherent lack of guaranteed reliability. Even today, system interconnection in the world of business-to-business and business-to-customer communication is becoming increasingly complex, extensive, and heterogeneous. This results in building larger and larger integrated systems using a composition of interconnected distributed components, sub-systems, and services. We strongly believe that the Internet of Systems that focuses on inter-connection architectures and technology will become an integral part of Internet of Things. As the limitations of the traditional approach that relies on tightly-coupled communication between the components are getting widely recognized, distributed event-based architectures are becoming the prevailing paradigm for inter-system communication due to enhanced decoupling and reduced dependencies between the components. In particular, such architectures allow improved scalability and manageability as well as fine-grained configuration and adaptation of individual components.
These architectures pose a significant potential for inter-connecting objects in a wide spectrum of communication environments in a society, such as digital homes, offices, hospitals, and factories. Examples of systems with a positive impact on society that can be built using event-based data-dissemination schemes are manifold. They range from telemedicine and health-care services for elderly people and persons with special needs to environment monitoring, business asset management, large-scale power management, and integrated services in telecommunication systems.
At this time, however, both commercial middleware software and even state-of-the-art research middleware for data dissemination lack the technological foundations to cope with the enormous volume of data, constantly changing underlying network connectivity, and dynamic system organization that are inherent to modern inter-system communication. Typically, numerous information transmitters produce intense continuous data flows as well as massive unpredictable bursts of data of varying criticality at geographically dispersed locations. This data needs to be rapidly and reliably disseminated to a large number of potentially mobile and heterogeneous clients, in a way that intelligently adapts to both the underlying contextual conditions and user-specified requirements. In order to build a system that is capable of handling such a demanding situation, there is a clear need to develop fundamentally new middleware technologies for adaptive, scalable, and dependable handling of intense dynamic information flows.