Towards an architecture for runtime interoperability

Interoperability remains a fundamental challenge when connecting heterogeneous systems which encounter and spontaneously communicate with one another in pervasive computing environments. This challenge is exasperated by the highly heterogeneous technologies employed by each of the interacting parties, i.e., in terms of hardware, operating system, middleware protocols, and application protocols. This paper introduces Connect, a software framework which aims to resolve this interoperability challenge in a fundamentally different way. Connect dynamically discovers information about the running systems, uses learning to build a richer view of a system's behaviour and then uses synthesis techniques to generate a connector to achieve interoperability between heterogeneous systems. Here, we introduce the key elements of Connect and describe its application to a distributed marketplace application involving heterogeneous technologies