Most current sensor network applications are built for fixed sensor platforms with a specific wireless network support, building on top of lightweight OS or even directly on the hardware, and writing applications in an imperative way and from each local node’s perspective. This results in software that supports only a unique set of sensors, are fragile, and cannot be ported to other platforms.Such software is not acceptable in machine-to-machine (M2M) systems where applications must run on many platforms that areinter-operatable and may evolve with time. In this paper we present a project on building intelligent middleware for M2M. The middleware isdesigned to perform automatic sensor identification, node configuration, software upgrade, and system re-configuration. Itallows the developer to specify the application behavior at a higher level, instead of telling each sensor node what to do. A prototypedesign is presented, as well as the status of our current implementation.

Kwei-Jay Lin is a Full Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, USA. He is an IEEE Fellow and co-chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Business Informatics and Systems. He was a Chair Research Fellow at the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, in Taiwan during 2007-2008 and a Distinguished Visitor at the Tsinghua University in China during summer 2009. Before joining UC Irvine, he was an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Springer Journal on Service-Oriented Computing and Applications, and Editor-in-Chief of the Software Publication Track, Journal of Information Science and Engineering. He was Associate Editors of the IEEE Trans. on Parallel and Distributed Systems and the IEEE Trans. on Computers. He has served on many international conferences, most recently as conference chairs of CEC 2009, SOCA 2009 and SOCA 2010, and program vice-chair of ICPP 2010. His research interest includes service-oriented systems, business informatics technology, real-time systems, distributed systems, and operating systems.