Context-Aware Middleware Support for the Nomadic Mobile Services on Multi-homed Handheld Mobile Devices

Nowadays, a variety of handheld mobile devices are capable of connecting to the Internet using multiple network interfaces. This is referred to as multi-homing. In addition to this, enriched computation resources allow them to host nomadic mobile services and provide these services to the clients located anywhere in the Internet. Potential advantages of multi-homing for nomadic mobile services typically includes: an increased service availability and improved service performance. However, applications running on the handheld mobile devices either do not, or cannot, exploit multi-homing. In this paper we address the problem of providing infrastructural support to the nomadic mobile services that can fully exploit multi-homing. To this end we propose to incorporate multi-homing functionality and support in a middleware layer to reduce the complexity of the design and maintenance of these services. The proposed solution uses a context-aware computing approach to realize this functionality. We report the initial experimental results in the remote tele-monitoring of a patient equipped with a Body Area Network.