Services for Context Prediction and Proactive Adaptation in Ad-Hoc Environments

Context-awareness has evolved from a research challenge in pervasive computing to a solid mainstream research activity that enables run-time knowledge of the application environment. The complexity of dealing with context- and situation-awareness increases manifold, when the application environment is partially or fully based on an ad-hoc wireless communications and networking topology. Ad hoc environments have additional complexity compared to traditional infrastructure-based networked environment be it wired or wireless. This complexity is primarily due to more uncertainty, faster changes, greater needs for abundant computational resources, greater needs for smart, robust and flexible software. In recent years much of European (FP6 and FP7) and worldwide research effort have been directed towards and invested into study and design of context-aware systems. Examples of such efforts include: Context Builder (Context-Aware Computing Group, MIT)- a system designed to allow context aware systems to be built easily and rapidly without requiring any user programming; ICAA (HCI Institute, CMU)- Intelligibility of Context-Aware Applications-aims at improving the usability of context-aware applications and designing interaction techniques and programming tools that will help application designers make their systems intelligent; Nexus (U Stuttgart) – managing context in a global-scale architecture. Context quality is addressed as well as history, current context, and context prognosis. Adaptation in pervasive computing is addressed by a number o