Evolutionary and efficient context management in heterogeneous environments

Mobile computing and pervasive environments are mainly characterized by heterogeneity of devices, with different capabilities, resources, operating systems and applications. In a realistic scenario for context-aware computing, middleware should be deployable in the whole distributed system, despite device's resource limitations, and the developer should be able to evolve the context model when new context-aware applications or context providers are introduced. This paper discusses how context modeling and design of middleware architecture can impact on the efficiency of provision, distribution and access of context information in heterogeneous environments. This paper describes a middleware architecture and design strategies in order to address such requirements.