Context-Aware Middleware Support for the Nomadic Mobile Services on Multi-homed Handheld Mobile Devices

Abstract

Nowadays, a variety ofhandheld mobile devices are capable of connecting to the Internet using multiple network interfaces. This is referred to as multi-homing. In addition to this, enriched computation resources allow them to host nomadic mobile services and provide these services to the clients located anywhere in the Internet. Potential advantages of multi-homing for nomadic mobile services typically includes: an increased service availability and improved service performance. However, applications running on the handheld mobile devices either do not, or cannot, exploit multi-homing. In this paper we address the problem ofproviding infrastructural support to the nomadic mobile services that can fully exploit multi-homing. To this end we propose to incorporate multi-homing functionality and support in a middleware layer to reduce the complexity of the design and maintenance of these services. The proposed solution uses a context-aware computing approach to realize this functionality. We report the initial experimental results in the remote telemonitoring of a patient equipped with a Body Area Network.

Context-aware middleware architecture for vertical handover support to multi-homed nomadic mobile services

“…It provides information about network's maximum downlink throughput, and not the uplink, which would be more appropriate for NMS. This paper extends the work reported in [12] in the following three ways. Firstly, for a handover-decision, besides the theoretical throughput of available networks, the MSP considers other relevant context information acquired directly from the context sources at the mobile device and provided by the context sources placed in the fixed network.…”

“…However, since the architecture of the QoS prediction context source is not obvious from the information provided in Table 2, we choose to provide its brief overview in the further section. Our proposal of the chosen context information as presented in Tables, is based on the earlier experience with the remote tele-monitoring service using Context-Aware MSP [12], current experience with the design and development of the QoS context source and also the literature reviewed in the related work. For a given device, because of the processing power required for creating and transmitting NMS data, CPU type and clock speed influence the e2eQoS of the (currently used) network.…”

“…The work reported in [12] illustrates design, validation and performance evaluation of the contextaware MSP which simply uses the information about the networks the mobile device is connected to, and always selects the network with the highest theoretical throughput to handover to (e.g. always prefers WLAN over GPRS).…”

“…always prefers WLAN over GPRS). In [12], only one context source, particularly, the Communication Context Source (CCS) provides the knowledge on current state of network resources, which is further processed by the context processor and used by the context reasoner for decision making. It is important to notice that the CCS does not distinguish between network's uplink and downlink direction.…”

Towards a Technology Agnostic Approach to Developing Mobile Applications and Services

“…The middleware that is distributed across the intermediary and device offers the potential to provide a solution to the reachability problem. MobileHost [12] [13] [14], Nokia Mobile Web Server [5] and MSP (Mobile Service Platform) [15] [16] [17] take the intermediary approach.…”