The contribution of this paper is to present a novel and well-experimented middleware service platform and its architecture for service gateway based distributed systems. This is called the MidGate platform. The research problem that the MidGate platform addresses is how to facilitate the development of interoperable applications into heterogeneous and distributed service gateway based environments. The paper is based on the constructive method of analyzing the related research results, technologies, and trial systems. The MidGate platform is a middleware platform that provides communication middleware, a set of generic service elements, and a dynamically reconfigurable service framework to be applied in the development and deployment of distributed applications. The MidGate architecture is defined on the basis of the requirements of real applications, and it is evaluated in a series of laboratory prototypes reviewed in the paper.

The contribution of this paper is a novel peer-topeer (P2P) middleware solution for extending the reach, scale and functionality of content delivery networks (CDNs). The research problem of extending legacy CDN functionality towards user-to-user content networking and enhancing the CDN quality attributes of reach and scale are addressed. The proposed P2P middleware solution extends the reach and scale of CDNs to cover the digital home environment via specialized virtual multimedia home gateways and extends the legacy CDN functionality by enabling user-generated content sharing via the P2P extended CDN infrastructure.