Context-sensitive object request broker for ubiquitous computing environments

Abstract

Context-awareness is an important property of applications in ubiquitous computing and communication (ubicomp) environments. Context-sensitive applications use various data from the surrounding environments and the devices to adapt their behavior. Using context as a criterion to transparently establish communication links among devices requires effective system support. A context-sensitive middleware is effective to address these emerging applications since such a middleware provides both development and runtime supports to context-sensitive applications in addition to providing the interoperability in heterogeneous ubicomp environments. This implies that the object request broker (ORB) of the middleware must provide a mechanism to provide context-sensitive communication among objects. In this paper, the principles and software-hardware co-design aspect of a context-sensitive ORB is presented to facilitate context-sensitive communication among application objects in ubicomp environments.