Designing Lightweight Software Architectures for Smart Environments

Smart environment applications have gained a lot of attention and acceptance from the community. For this reason, many design and evaluation efforts target these applications. However, these applications rely on a software architecture that driven by a well-designed middleware. In this paper the authors propose design and evaluation requirements for smart environment software architectures and demonstrate how these requirements can be met with a simple, lightweight publish-subscribe design paradigm. They describe the CLM middleware that follows these requirements and illustrate its extensive use as part of the CASAS smart home system.