California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

Middleware has emerged as an important architectural component in supporting distributed applications. The role of middleware is to present a unified programming model to application writers and to mask out problems of heterogeneity and distribution. Mobile sensors fall into the space of distributed systems that suffer from isolated data sources, heterogeneous communication infrastructure and varying application requirements. In this report, we provide a middleware architecture that addresses the needs of a distributed system made of mobile sensors in general and discuss the implementation of this middleware architecture in a mobile sensor network comprised of vehicles and intersections producing traffic related data for traffic safety and operations. We conclude our report with some performance measures that relate to the cost of overhead incurred from using the middleware which prove it efficient for traffic management applications.