An Efficient Dynamic Integration Middleware for Cyber-Physical Systems in Mobile Environments

Abstract

Advances in information technologies have brought a wide variety of computing environments. In recent years, integrations of computational, networking, and physical elements in different environments tend to increase, so interoperability between heterogeneous computing elements has become a key area of research. A cyber-physical system (CPS) that has gained a lot of attention lately is a tight integration of the system’s computational and physical elements. The CPS technology builds on the older discipline of embedded systems, and CPS applications can be found in diverse industry sectors, such as smart home, health care, and transportation. There is a high possibility that a global CPS network that integrates different CPS networks appears in the near future. This paper proposes a CPS middleware framework that ensures interoperability and communication between heterogeneous components in a global CPS network. Through local and global communications, the proposed middleware makes mobile devices in different networks interoperable. It employs Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and performs protocol conversion to communicate with devices using different protocols.