Reactive queries in mobile ad hoc networks

Pervasive computing in mobile ad hoc networks requires that applications query their network environment for services and react to a plethora of events fired by other devices in that network responding to such queries. Current context-aware and event-driven architectures require the programmer to react to these events via a carefully crafted network of observers and event handlers, while inherently introducing complex concurrency issues. This paper proposes the integration of two techniques to solve these problems: ambient references and reactive programming. Ambient references are object-oriented communication abstractions that represent nearby remote objects in the mobile network and that make it possible to generate the events mentioned above. The reactive programming paradigm provides an abstraction over events such that the application can be written in a conventional programming style with explicit control flow.