Artemis-FollowMe: An agent-based middleware for mobile context-aware applications

Context Awareness and Mobility are two fundamental characteristics of ubiquitous and pervasive computing, where users may wander among smart spaces equipped with kinds of devices providing types of services with respects to the changing contexts of the users, the environments and the services themselves. Generally, an underlying infrastructure or middleware is needed to support such mobile context aware applications. Inspired by the inherent autonomy and mobility of software agents, in this paper we propose a middleware named Artemis-FollowMe, which utilizes mobile agents as basic components both for handling contexts and building applications. Especially, we focus on how the mobile capability of agents could be used to enable distributed and efficient management of contexts. We also have built a prototype and conducted many experiments to show how and how well our FollowMe works.