CADBA: A Context-aware Architecture Based on Context Database for Mobile Computing

Context-aware computing is one of the research fields of pervasive computing. Context-aware systems can react to the user's preference according to the circumstances called context including location, time and other environment conditions. Many context-aware computing paradigms were developed in recent year, however, it is difficult for the present systems to extend the application domains and interoperate with other services due to the problem of heterogeneity between systems. In his paper, we proposed a context-aware architecture based on context database in which the concept of independence is imported. The main idea of the framework is to initiate the physical context independence and the logical context independence into context-aware computing. The architecture thus can easily integrate different service domains and diverse devices into a unifying environment.

1. Introduction

With rapid growth of mobile devices such as PDAs and smart phones, the techniques of mobile computing are becoming important and popular in recent years. The applications of mobile computing conduct the research issues to pervasive computing and ubiquitous computing. Context-aware computing is also one of the research fields and domains in mobile computing. A context-aware system is a mobile environment in which applications can discover and make use of context information including user location, time, date, nearby devices and other environmental activities to adapt their operations and behavior [6]. Due to the fast development of wireless communication on mobile devices, different kinds of context-aware architectures were designed and employed for a wide spectrum of applications. [2] However, since the individual focus of each framework on its specific application domain, the current context-aware systems are heterogeneous in all aspects, such as hardware, mobile resources, operating systems, application software, and platforms. The serious heterogeneous characteristics of context-aware computing are especially important and become significant drawbacks while developing or integrating context-aware services for the applications in mobile computing environments.