Mobile computing middleware for context-aware applications

Abstract

The hypothesis of this paper is that a new form of middleware can be developed that delivers better quality of service to mobile applications. This middleware should maintain in its internal data structures an updated representation of context information, and make it available to executing applications so that they can listen to changes in the context (i.e. inspection of the middleware) and influence the behaviour of the middleware accordingly (i.e. adaptation of the middleware). The main contribution of this research is an investigation of the underlying principles of mobile computing middleware, and in particular of reflection as a means to allow applications to dynamically inspect and adapt middleware behaviour according to the current execution context.