A pluggable and reconfigurable architecture for a context-aware enabling middleware system

Abstract

Context awareness is a core feature of modern mobile and ubiquitous computing systems. Although it has not reached its full potential yet, one can already observe significant activity in the area of software engineering for supporting the development of context-aware applications. An example of such an activity is the MUSIC project, which proposes a middleware featuring a generic and reusable context management system. This paper describes the pluggable architecture of this system, and explains how it advances the state of the art through its support for context heterogeneity and better resource utilization. The former is achieved with the use of a novel architecture, which enables the separation of low-level, platform-specific context plug-ins from higher-level application-specific ones. The improved resource utilization is achieved through intelligent activation and deactivation of context plug-ins based on the needs of the active applications. The proposed approach has been experimentally evaluated and the results indicate that it significantly improves the resource utilization in context-aware applications, especially when deployed on lightweight mobile devices. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.