Solar: An Open Platform for Context-Aware Mobile Applications

Abstract

Emerging pervasive computing technologies transform the way we live and work by embedding computation in our surrounding environment. To avoid increasing complexity, and allow the user to concentrate on her tasks, applications in a pervasive computing environment must automatically adapt to their changing context, including the user state and the physical and computational environment in which they run. Solar is a middleware platform to help these "context-aware" applications aggregate desired context from heterogeneous sources and to locate environmental services depending on the current context. By moving most of the context computation into the infrastructure, Solar allows applications to run on thin mobile clients more effectively. By providing an open framework to enable dynamic injection of context processing modules, Solar shares these modules across many applications, reducing application development cost and network traffic. By distributing these modules across network nodes and reconfiguring the distribution at runtime, Solar achieves parallelism and online load balancing.

Context-Aware Mobile Power Management Using Fuzzy Inference as a Service

“…Periodically downloading applications have risen in popularity, and now consist of a significant portion of mobile apps [5]. We model our test applications after common examples of such apps: RSS feed-following, Twitter, and e-mail retrieval, implemented in RSSApp, TwitterApp, and EmailApp, respectively.…”

“…Context has been defined as "any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity", and in mobile devices, it is obtained from sensors, communication media, or locally available data [15]. Context awareness in mobile devices has been proven useful when developing user interfaces [15] [12], proactive service provisioning [4] [5], or efficient resource management [10]. The concept has been explored in several comprehensive studies [2][8] [21] over the past decade, as new mobile technologies emerge.…”

PerPos: A Translucent Positioning Middleware Supporting Adaptation of Internal Positioning Processes

“…Edges in the graph represent the data that flows between components. The notion of explicit representation of processing graphs has previously been applied in a number of other domains, e.g., Solar [10] for generic context fusion, PAQ [11] which supports generic queries over temporalspatial data and PCOM [12] which uses a component graph to compose behavior. The PerPos positioning middleware uses the graph representation to support inspection and adaptation of the positioning process by exposing the processing graph to developers.…”

Sharing hierarchical context for mobile web services

“…The Solar middleware by Chen and Kotz [17] provides a platform for contextaware mobile applications consisting of one star and several planet nodes. Client applications need not collect, aggregate, or process context themselves but subscribe to context changes at the central star.…”