A Novel Platform for Context Maintenance and Discovery in a Ubiquitous Environment

Context maintenance and discovery, which aim to represent, manage and share context information, have been discussed since context-awareness was presented in the 1990s. These become more challenging when being applied to a ubiquitous environment where dynamic and distributed computing happens anytime, anywhere. In this paper, a platform for ubiquitous context representation and its distribution is introduced. Five semantic dimensions are used to recognize and organize potential context information. A context information base (CiB), a context repository, is integrated in each device of a ubiquitous network to maintain context parameters discovered from neighbor nodes. The CiComm protocol distributes context information and accordingly realizes the capabilities of context deployment and retrieval. The resulting architecture is fully extensible being infrastructure-less and based on an ontological model. Simulations carried out using NS-2 have also demonstrated the operations of the protocol and proven through experimental results that it works efficiently in a dynamic ubiquitous environment.