Hybrid Aspect of Context-Aware Middleware for Pervasive Smart Environment: A Review

Pervasive computing has made almost every device we see today to be communicated and function in collaboration with one another. Since the portable devices have become a part of our everyday life, people are more involved in a pervasive computing environment. They engage with many computational devices simultaneously without knowing the availability of their existence. The current world is being filled with more and more smart environments. These smart environments make them to be attracted towards the new technological emergence in the field of pervasive computing. Various researches are being carried out to improve the smart environment and their applications. Middleware plays a vital role in building the pervasive applications. The pervasive devices act based on the context of the situation, that is, they do their actions according to the environment of the application. They react to the situations smartly as they can take their own decisions based on the context developed for that specific application. Most of the pervasive applications were using its own middleware that is specific towards their need. As today, most of the applications are using their own middleware with their specific requirement, which leads us to unearth out their common features and their scope of using it. In this paper, a survey on the various hybrid aspects of the different context-aware middleware has been done. This middleware is classified based on service, context, and device aspects. Merits and demerits are identified from the existing smart environments, and future perspective of their development such as generic context-aware middleware need has been discussed.