Adaptive interaction for enabling pervasive services

• Authors: Michael Samulowitz;Florian Michahelles;Claudia Linnhoff-Popien
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM international workshop on Data engineering for wireless and mobile access
• Year: 2001

We describe an architecture that allows mobile users to access a variety of services provided by pervasive computing environments. Novel to our approach is that the system selects and executes services taking into account arbitrary contextual information (e.g. location or preferences). Our architecture is based on an adaptive service interaction scheme; individual service requests are attributed by context constraints, which specify the adaption policy. Context constraints may relate to spatial or temporal concerns. We propose a document-based approach; so called Context-Aware Packets (CAPs) contain context constraints and data for describing an entire service request. Intermediary network nodes route and apply the data to services, which match the embedded constraints. Services are identified by characterizing attributes, rather then explicit network addresses. The execution of selected services may be deferred, and triggered by a specific event. Service requests carry the context of their use, therefore our system works well in environments with intermitted connectivity, less interaction with the issuing requester is required.