Experiences from developing a distributed context management system for enabling adaptivity

Abstract

Today, one can observe an ever increasing trend in the use of mobile systems. This change inevitably affects the software running on such devices by necessitating additional functionality such as context awareness and adaptive behavior. While some developers design their systems to be fully self-reliant with regard to context awareness, others aim for more synergistic approaches by allowing context sharing across devices. This paper describes our experience with first designing and implementing a basic context management system, and then with extending it to allow context distribution. In the proposed architecture, the developers define the context dependencies for their software independendy of the availability of context information in their corresponding devices. An automated mechanism is then used to match these needs to the corresponding providers, even when those reside across distributed devices. This approach enables them to utilize shared context information at runtime thus reducing both development efforts and hardware costs. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007.