Preface

The idea of having this book came from my interest in producing a practical book about middleware design and architecture and gathering all the recent research studies in this field. My previous work about radio-frequency identification (RFID) middleware design and its application to many areas, such as, library management, supply chain management (SCM), and health care, has motivated me to edit this book concerning the different existing middleware design patterns and applications that have emerged recently due to the technological revolution and the increasing demand to develop smart environments.

Middleware refers to the distributed software layer that bridges the gap and removes impediments between the heterogeneous hardware platforms and the backend applications requirements. It serves as an intermediate layer providing common services and programming abstractions and hiding the low-level management of the connected hardware. With the recent advances in distributed systems and enabling technologies, such as RFID, wireless sensor networks (WSNs), internet of things (IoT), internet of energy (IoE), cloud computing, context-aware pervasive computing, ubiquitous computing, etc., middleware design and development has become a necessity, taking increasing importance. A dedicated middleware solution is required for managing and monitoring the different hardware devices, as well as processing dynamically generated high volumes of data, applying contextual rules before disseminating these data to the different connected backend applications, supporting rapid applications development, and also targeting the security, privacy, and other issues both at the hardware and applications levels.

This book provides a holistic view about the different design patterns and reference models used in middleware architectures in general, followed by a detailed survey of recent propositions of specific middleware architectures dedicated to the use of the different emerging technologies, such as, automating technologies, including but not limited to IoT, RFID, WSNs, and cloud computing.

The aim of this book is to approach middleware systems from an architectural and application perspective and to cover the middleware design and implementation challenges related to each application field. This book, therefore, intends to provide a comprehensive body of knowledge for the benefit of middleware systems' designers and developers in different application domains and to bring together in one place important and up-to-date contributions in this fast-moving research area, and also the remaining issues and challenges that still need to be considered by researchers in their future works.

The organization of this book is directed by middleware design patterns and applications' development considerations. The first section of this book presents middleware applications: Chapter 1 discusses and presents the different IoT middleware design patterns and surveys the most recent existing middleware solutions for each pattern; Chapter 2 presents the middleware architecture and its adaptation to IEEE 802.11 protocol, and Chapter 3 presents a case of middleware application used to build a connected and smart manufacturing environment. The second section of this book

gives an overview of middleware solutions and design patterns for cloud platforms, which is presented in Chapter 4, followed by an overview of the concept of middleware in the context of cloud computing and a detailed discussion of the major cloud security challenges and solutions given, which is presented in Chapter 5.

> **Mehdia Ajana El Khaddar** Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco

Section 1
