ABSTRACT

Mobile Computing Middleware for Context-Aware Applications

Licia Capra, Department of Computer Science, UCL

The increasing popularity of wireless devices, such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants, watches and the like, is enabling new classes of applications that present challenging problems to designers. Applications have to be aware of, and adapt to, variations in the context of execution, such as fluctuating network bandwidth, decreasing battery power, changes in location or device capabilities, and so on. We argue that middleware solutions for wired distributed systems cannot be used in a mobile setting, as the principle of transparency that has driven their design runs counter to the new degrees of awareness imposed by mobility. We propose the marriage of reflection and metadata as a means for middleware to give applications dynamic access to information about their execution context. We describe a conceptual model and an architecture that provide the basis of our reflective middleware. We conclude the talk discussing the main points of our research agenda.

Maintained by rbennett@cs.ucl.ac.uk