Tuples On The Air: A Middleware for Context-Aware Computing in Dynamic Networks

We present TOTA (“Tuples On The Air”), a novel middleware for supporting adaptive context-aware activities in dynamic network scenarios. The key idea in TOTA is to rely on spatially distributed tuples for both representing contextual information and supporting uncoupled and adaptive interactions between application components. On the one hand, the middleware propagates tuples across a network on the basis of application-specific patterns, to define sorts of “computational fields”, and adaptively re-shape the resulting distributed structures accordingly to changes in the network scenario. On the other hand, application components can locally “sense” these fields and can rely on them for both acquiring contextual information and carry on complex coordination activities in an adaptive way. Several examples in different scenarios show the effectiveness of such an approach.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ICDCSW
• Authors: Marco Mamei, Franco Zambonelli, Letizia Leonardi
• Keywords: Adaptive Context-aware Activities, Contextual Information, Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICDCSW 2003, Network Scenario