Dynamic Context Bindings in Pervasive Middleware

Abstract

Context-awareness (CA) enables the development of personalized pervasive services. Current context-aware infrastructures focus on middleware solutions to support acquisition, usage and management of context. However, using context requires the CA application to create a binding between itself and one or more context producing entities. Creating this binding is the responsibility of the CA application developer, which is often an extensive manual task. The ad hoc availability of context-producing entities further complicates this responsibility. This paper proposes an application infrastructure, coined CACI, which offers a binding transparency to support rapid development of CA applications. CACI enables developers to specify context requirements at a high abstraction level using a declarative binding language. CACI also provides the creation and maintenance of bindings to context producing entities based on such specifications. This paper discusses the design and implementation of CACI. Additionally, it discusses the validation of CACI using a pervasive healthcare scenario.