A model for Reflective Middleware based on fuzzy rule for context-awareness injection in ubiquitous computing environments

The next wave of communication and applications will rely on new services provided by the Internet of Things (IoT) which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings, and cities. In the era of massive number of connected things and objects with high growth rate, several challenges have raised, such as new modeling techniques, patterns, and paradigms for composing and developing software and services able to deal with changing context and requirements. There are several factors to be considered in the design and implementation of IoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying a suitable ’middleware’ which is placed between things and applications as a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. In this paper, we propose a solution allowing an IoT middleware to conform with reflective programming paradigm to get more flexibility and adaptivity with reference to the external context. The approach is based on a formal model in which fuzzy rules enable the actions that can be activated by the system. We implemented and validated the proposed model on a real IoT middleware in a smart home scenario.