MIMOVE Research team

Middleware on the Move

Team presentation

Given the prevalence of global networking and computing infrastructures, mobile networking environments, powerful hand-held user devices, and physical-world sensing and actuation devices, the possibilities of new mobile distributed systems have reached unprecedented levels. Such software systems are dynamically composed of networked resources from both the immediate and the global environment. Besides well-known characteristics, such as dynamicity, heterogeneity, and ad hoc, opportunistic interactions, the resulting systems have new features deriving from the recent massive adoption of user-controlled, sensor-equipped mobile devices, which enable large scale sensing and actuation related to both the physical and social context of their users. All these characteristics combined call for radically new ways in conceiving, developing and running mobile distributed systems, which constitutes MiMove's research focus.

Research themes

MiMove’s research focuses more specifically on the following topics: 

• Emergent mobile distributed systems. Uncertainty in the execution environment calls for designing mobile distributed systems that are able to run in a beforehand unknown, ever-changing context. Emergent mobile distributed systems are systems that, due to their automated, dynamic, environment-dependent composition and execution, emerge in a possibly non-anticipated way and manifest emergent properties, i.e., both systems and their properties take their complete form only at runtime and may evolve afterwards. We focus on enabling the emergence of mobile distributed systems while assuring that their required properties are met. 

• Large-scale mobile collaborative crowd-sensing and actuation. The extremely large scale, heterogeneity and dynamicity of future mobile sensing and actuation systems call for algorithms and protocols for addressing the resulting challenges. More specifically, since huge numbers of connected mobile devices and their users will be able to sense quantitative and qualitative phenomena, analyze the sensed data to arrive at decisions, and drive actuation to change the environment, enabling coordination among them is essential. Our research leads to techniques for coordination of future mobile crowd-sensing and actuation systems, particularly ensuring the quality of sensed data. 

• Human as sensor. The increasingly low cost of MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) and low-power microprocessors has led to new sensors being embedded in smartphones and wearables every day. Such mobile sensing systems provide low quality data, whose inaccuracy may be corrected thanks to the mass of sensors carried by people combined with advanced data assimilation techniques. To leverage this new, human-centric sensing paradigm, our research aims to enable: (i) incentivizing people to engage in the process to indeed reach the expected mass, (ii) ensuring the quality of sensed data by effectively combining quantitative and qualitative sensing, and (iii) guaranteeing quality of service in sensing versus resource efficiency, including privacy of people. 

Outcomes of the three identified research topics are implemented as middleware architectures for mobile distributed systems, enabling practical application and assessment of our research. Although our research results can have an impact on various application domains, we focus in particular on the domain of smart cities, an area of rapidly growing social, economic and technological interest.

International and industrial relations

• Inria Project Lab CityLab (http://citylab.inria.fr) - Study of ICT solutions to promote social sustainability in smart cities, with Inria CLIME, DICE, FUN, MYRIADS, SMIS, URBANET, WILLOW, and UC Berkeley, in the context of the Inria@SiliconValley program (https://project.inria.fr/siliconvalley/). 

• H2020 CHOReVOLUTION (http://www.chorevolution.eu/) - Automated synthesis of dynamic and secured choreographies for the Future Internet, with Univ. of L’Aquila, Thales, Cefriel, OW2, Softeco, Tirasa, Viktoria. 

• H2020 FIESTA-IoT (http://www.fiesta-iot.eu/) - Federated interoperable semantic IoT/Cloud testbeds and applications, with Univ. of Galway, Univ. of Surrey, Univ. of Southampton, Univ. of Cantabria, NEC, Unparallel Innovation, Easy Global Market, Com4innov, AIT, Sodercan, SDR, KETI. 

• Inria DRI/CEFIPRA Associate Team SARATHI (https://mimove.inria.fr/ inria-associate-team-sarathi/) - Personalized Mobility Service Platform for Urban Travelers in Emerging Markets, with IIIT-Delhi.

Keywords: Middleware Software Engineering Mobile Distributed Systems Physical And Social Sensing Internet Of Things Future Internet Service Oriented Computing