"Middleware supporting even-based communication is widely recognized as being well suited to mobile applications since it naturally accomodates a dynamically changing population of interacting entities and the dynamic reconfiguration of the connections between them."

"With the increased research in mobile ad hoc networks new application domains, for example mobile robotics and traffic management have emerged."

"Existing research on event-based middleware for wireless networks has mainly focused on what may be termed nomadic applications. .... In contrast we focus on collaborative applications.  These applications are composed of mobile nodes that use use the wireless network to communicate with each other within some common geographical area.  Although these applications may use infrastructure networks, they will often use ad hoc networks to support communciation without the need for a separate infrastructure."

"We are particularly interested in collaborative applications with real-time constraints for timeliness and reliability, for example communication between mobile robots or inter-vehicle communication.  Timely and reliable communication is essential for applications in these domains to be realised.  The real-time event-based communication paradigm has been recognized as an appropriate high-level communication scheme to connect autonomous components in large distributed control systems."

"STEAM is an event-based middleware designed for use in ad hoc networks.  STEAM differs from other event-based middleware in that its architecture does not rely on the presence of any separate infrastructure, event notification filters are distributed, and filtering may be applied to functional and non functional attributes."

"In particular, filters may be applied to either the subject or the content of an event notification, or to non-functional attributes such as location and time.  Filters may be used to define geographical areas within which notifications are valid, therby bounding the propogation of these notifications."

"To achieve real-time event-based communciation in a dynamic mobile ad hoc wireless network the unpredictability inherent in the environment must be reduced.  STEAM will use predictive components ...."- goto