DOI 10.1007/s11227-011-0661-x Decentralized checking of context inconsistency in pervasive computing environments

Abstract Contexts are often inconsistent in pervasive computing environments, ow-ing to many heterogeneous devices with limited processing capabilities, imperfect measurement techniques, and user movement. A variety of schemes have been pro-posed to check context inconsistency. However, they implicitly require central con-trol. This requirement inhibits their effectiveness in some pervasive computing envi-ronments (e.g., transport systems) where all nodes are resource-constrained and can-not act as a centralized node. To this end, we propose in this paper DCCI—a scheme of Decentralized Checking of Context Inconsistency in pervasive computing envi-ronments. DCCI exploits a simple, yet efficient, preference-based locality that de-notes nodes requiring that the same context can check the inconsistency on this type of contexts. According to this locality, DCCI constructs a preference-based short-cut structure such that it checks context inconsistency within the shortcut structure. Extensive experiments show that DCCI can accurately and efficiently check context inconsistency in the presence of node churns and heterogeneity