Supporting Adaptive Ubiquitous Applications With the Solar System

Abstract

As we embed more computers into our daily environment, ubiquitous computing promises to make them less noticeable and help to prevent information overload. We see, however, few ubiquitous applications that are able to adapt to the dynamics of user, physical, and computational context. We believe that there are two challenges causing this lack of ubiquitous applications: there is no flexible and scalable way to support information collection and dissemination in a ubiquitous and mobile environment, and there is no general approach to building adaptive applications given heterogeneous contextual information. We propose a system infrastructure, Solar, to meet these challenges. Solar uses a subscriptionbased operator graph abstraction and allows dynamic composition of stackable operators to manage ubiquitous information sources. After developing a set of diverse adaptive applications, we expect to identify fundamental techniques for context-aware adaptation. Our expectation is that Solar's end-to-end support for information collection, dissemination, and utilization will make it easy to build adaptive applications for a ubiquitous mobile environment with many users and devices.

Context Aggregation and Dissemination in Ubiquitous Computing Systems

“…Defense Advanced Research projects Agency,3701 North Fairfax Drive,Arlington,VA,22203-1714 8. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION REPORT NUMBER…”

“…We describe our prototype, the "Solar" system, in detail in a technical report [8]. In this paper we focus on the graph abstraction and related design choices.…”

Context aggregation and dissemination in ubiquitous computing systems

“…We give an overview of our Solar system that implements the graph abstraction. Interested readers can find more details in technical reports about Solar [7,8,23] and about a smart reminder application built on top of Solar [22].…”

“…The details of the specific Solar implementation, experimental results, security and privacy model, and applications are not the focus of this paper and interested readers are referred to our technical reports [7,8,22,23].…”

“…In Section 3 we describe the specifics of the graph abstraction. Section 4 overviews several design issues involved in realizing the graph abstraction, by discussing possible approaches and the specific choices we made in our prototype "Solar system"; the details of Solar's architecture and implementation are presented in other papers [7,8]. We mention related work in Section 5 and summarize in Section 6.…”