A peer-to-peer architecture for context lookup

As computing technology moves towards pervasive computing, many applications are beginning to make use of context information to adapt to and respond appropriately to their environments. Such a trend necessitates efficient search for context information in wide-area networks. In this paper, we propose a semantic P2P context lookup system. Peers are grouped based on the semantics of their local data which are extracted according to a set of schemas and are self-organized as a semantic overlay network. Context search requests are only routed to the appropriate nodes that have relevant data, reducing unnecessary query traffic and increasing the chances that the context data will be found quickly. To reduce maintenance overheads incurred by high-dimensional semantic overlay networks, we propose a one-dimensional ring space to construct peers and facilitate efficient query routing. Our simulation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed routing techniques.