Capra, Licia; (2003) Reflective mobile middleware for context-aware applications. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), University of London.

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Abstract

The increasing popularity of mobile devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants, and advances in wireless networking technologies, are enabling new classes of applications that present challenging problems to application designers. Applications have to be aware of, and adapt to, variations in the execution context, such as fluctuating network bandwidth and decreasing battery power, in order to deliver a good quality of service to their users. We argue that building applications directly on top of the network operating system would be extremely tedious and error-prone, as application developers would have to deal with these issues explicitly, and would consequently be distracted from the actual requirements of the application they are building. Rather, a middleware layered between the network operating system and the application should provide application developers with abstractions and mechanisms to deal with them. We investigate the principle of reflection and demonstrate how it can be used to support context-awareness and dynamic adaptation to context changes. We offer application engineers an abstraction of middleware as a dynamically customisable service provider, where each service can be delivered using different policies when requested in different contexts. Based on this abstraction, current middleware behaviour, with respect to a particular application, is reified in an application profile, and made accessible to the application for run-time inspection and adaptation. Applications can use the meta-interface that the middleware provides to change the information encoded in their profile, thus tailoring middleware behaviour to the user's needs. However, while doing so, conflicts may arise; different users may have different quality-of-service needs, and applications, in an attempt to full these needs, may customise middleware behaviour in conflicting ways. These conflicts have to be resolved in order to allow applications to come to an agreement, and thus be able to engage successful collaborations. We demonstrate how microeconomic techniques can be used to treat these kinds of conflicts. We offer an abstraction of the mobile setting as an economy, where applications compete to have a service delivered according to their quality-of-service needs. We have designed a mechanism where middleware plays the role of the auctioneer, collecting bids from the applications and delivering the service using the policy that maximises social welfare; that is, the one that delivers, on average, the best quality-of-service. We formalise the principles discussed above, namely reflection to support context-awareness and microeconomic techniques to support conflict resolution. To demonstrate their effectiveness in fostering the development of context-aware applications, we discuss a middleware architecture and implementation (CARISMA) that embed these principles, and report on performance and usability results obtained during a thorough evaluation stage.

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