Towards an object distribution management for heterogeneous ad-hoc systems

Ad-hoc (embedded) computer systems are characterized by a continuous change of available resources and requirements at runtime. Devices in such systems can provide services and data via service access points or ports, in general as objects accessible from elsewhere. To support interoperability, the object notion must be uniform for all participants, and object access can be provided by a common platform: the object distribution management (ODM) layer. Particularly heterogeneous systems consisting of devices developed in different implementation languages like Java and C, can benefit from a common abstraction layer that provides a global object address space and access support. However, in contrast to existing platforms for distributed object scenarios, small embedded devices require a very lightweight implementation, and a multi-language support needs well-aligned interfaces. This paper shortly introduces into the problem as it showed up in the AmbiComp research project, presents a first experimental ODM implementation in a native C development environment, and summarizes the resulting experiences.