Caching context information in pervasive systems

Context aware systems are systems that use context information to adapt their behaviour or the content they provide. This paper addresses the problem of disconnections between nodes in these systems. Disconnections in a context aware system may occur because of node mobility, network failures or node failures. A research opportunity lies in improving the robustness of such systems to disconnections. While traditional distributed systems methods of improving robustness in the face of disconnections can be applied to context aware systems, the additional metadata available to them may be leveraged to provide smarter caching algorithms. This paper presents ideas for context information caching algorithms that utilise such metadata. Copyright 2006 ACM