Middleware for Distributed Context-Aware Systems

Context-aware systems represent extremely complex and heterogeneous distributed systems, composed of sensors, actuators, application components, and a variety of context processing components that manage the flow of context information between the sensors/actuators and applications. The need for middleware to seamlessly bind these components together is well recognised. Numerous attempts to build middleware or infrastructure for context-aware systems have been made, but these have provided only partial solutions; for instance, most have not adequately addressed issues such as mobility, fault tolerance or privacy. One of the goals of this paper is to provide an analysis of the requirements of a middleware for context-aware systems, drawing from both traditional distributed system goals and our experiences with developing context-aware applications. The paper also provides a critical review of several middleware solutions, followed by a comprehensive discussion of our own PACE middleware. Finally, it provides a comparison of our solution with the previous work, highlighting both the advantages of our middleware and important topics for future research.