LooCI: the Loosely-coupled Component Infrastructure

LooCI has a new website, available at https://distrinet.cs.kuleuven.be/software/looci/

There you will find the latest version of LooCI, tools, documentation, publications and news.

The Google Code site is no longer maintained.

LooCI is a component infrastructure for heterogeneous networked embedded systems. It features a component model, execution environment and a distributed event bus. Various implementations of LooCI exist, allowing seamless operation of distributed applications composed out of different types of hardware nodes. Current implementations exist for Contiki (AVR Raven), Sun SPOT, OSGi and Android.

The key features of LooCI are:

• a component model for networked embedded systems
• runtime deployable components
• a distributed event bus hiding distribution aspects from application components
• interoperable implementations on various platforms (Contiki, Sun SPOT, OSGi and Android)

http://wiki.looci.googlecode.com/hg/images/LooCIExecEnvironment.png

The distributed architecture of LooCI is shown in the figure above. LooCI enabled nodes allow runtime deployment of application components. These components operate in LooCI"s execution environment, meaning that they are managed by the Reconfiguration Manager and use the Event Manager to communicate over the distributed event bus. Event exchange occurs via a set of interfaces; required interfaces and provided interfaces, which are used to receive and publish events respectively. Furthermore, a programming interface allows to manage application specific properties of a component (e.g. sensing interval, filtering threshold, user name, etc.)

http://wiki.looci.googlecode.com/hg/images/LooCIComponent.png

All communication in LooCI takes place over the distributed event bus. Using the concept of wires, interfaces of various components can be linked together in order to establish event exchange. As this wiring information is only maintained inside the Event Manager, LooCI components are unaware of the distributed application compositions in which they participate. This results in greater reuse opportunities for the components.

Both application and management events are exchanged over the event bus. Application events are published and handled by LooCI components, while management events are handled by each node"s local Reconfiguration Manager. Using these management events, one can control the life-cycle of components, manage properties of components, establish wirings between components, or inspect the current configuration state of a node.

==Publications== * Danny Hughes, Klaas Thoelen, Jef Maerien, Nelson Matthys, Pedro Javier del Cid Garcia, Wouter Horré, Christophe Huygens, Sam Michiels, Wouter Joosen, LooCI: the Loosely-coupled Component Infrastructure, IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (IEEE NCA12), Cambridge, MA, USA, 23-25 August 2012 [https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/351623/1/NCA_V2.0_Danny_CameraReady2.pdf PDF]

• Danny Hughes, Klaas Thoelen, Wouter Horré, Nelson Matthys, Pedro Javier del Cid Garcia, Sam Michiels, Christophe Huygens, Wouter Joosen, Jo Ueyama, Building wireless sensor network applications with LooCI, International Journal of Mobile Computing and Multimedia Communications, volume 2, issue 4, pages 38-64, October 2010

• Jo Ueyama, Danny Hughes, Nelson Matthys, Wouter Horré, Sam Michiels, Christophe Huygens, Wouter Joosen, An event-based component model for sensor networks: a case study for river monitoring, Proceedings of the tools session of the Brazilian symposium on computer networks and distributed systems (SBRC2010), Gramado, Brazil, 24-28 May 2010

• Danny Hughes, Klaas Thoelen, Wouter Horré, Nelson Matthys, Pedro Javier del Cid Garcia, Sam Michiels, Christophe Huygens, Wouter Joosen, LooCI: A loosely-coupled component infrastructure for networked embedded systems, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Advances in Mobile Computing & Multimedia, pages 195-203, Kualu Lumpur, Malaysia, 14-16 December 2009 [https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/252632/1/MOMM_33_hughes.pdf PDF]

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