A query-centric approach to supporting the development of context-aware applications for mobile ad hoc networks

  • Authors:
  • Gruia-Catalin Roman;Jamie Jenelle Payton

  • Affiliations:
  • Washington University in St. Louis;Washington University in St. Louis

  • Venue:
  • A query-centric approach to supporting the development of context-aware applications for mobile ad hoc networks
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

The wide-spread use of mobile computing devices has led to an increased demand for applications that operate dependably in opportunistically formed networks. A promising approach to supporting software development for such dynamic settings is to rely on the context-aware computing paradigm, in which an application views the state of the surrounding ad hoc network as a valuable source of contextual information that can be used to adapt its behavior. Collecting context information distributed across a constantly changing network remains a significant technical challenge. This dissertation presents a query-centered approach to simplifying context interactions in mobile ad hoc networks. Using such an approach, an application programmer views the surrounding world as a single data repository over which descriptive queries can be issued. Distributed context information appears to be locally available, effectively hiding the complex networking tasks required to acquire context in an open and dynamic setting. This dissertation identifies the research issues associated with developing a query-centric approach and discusses solutions to providing query-centric support to application developers. To promote rapid and dependable software development, a query-centric middleware is provided to the application programmer. These solutions provide the means to reason about the correctness of an application's design and potentially to reduce programmer effort and error.