A Context-Aware Framework to Enable Adaptation in Pervasive Computing Environments

Abstract

Pervasive computing environments based on the ubiquitous communications paradigm have attracted significant research interest and have found increased applicability in commercial settings, attributed to the fact that they provide seamless, customized and unobtrusive services to their users. The majority of solutions proposed in the related literature to enable pervasive computing involves specific platforms and rigid architectures that are tightly bound with their target applications and services. This approach suffers from having to introduce new context-aware applications, thus limiting deployment in existing configurations. Nevertheless, the notion of pervasive computing calls for solutions to be tailored to user needs and not conversely. In this paper we introduce a framework that enables systems to become pervasive in a transparent manner, handling context monitoring and ubiquitous communications issues behind the scenes without affecting existing applications. Pervasive behavior is guaranteed by adapting systems based on monitored context information and guiding their re-configuration. We present the architecture of our proposed framework and discuss application scenarios, while considering evaluation aspects.