Supporting Context-Aware Application Development in Ad Hoc Mobile Networks

Some of the most dynamic systems being built today consist of physically mobile hosts and logically mobile agents. Such systems exhibit frequent configuration changes and a great deal of resource variability. Applications executing under these circumstances need to react continuously and rapidly to changes in operating conditions and must adapt their behavior accordingly. Applications with these capabilities are referred to as context-aware. Much of the current work on context-aware computing relies on information directly available to an application via context sensors on its local host, e.g., user profile, host location, time of day, resource availability, and quality of service measurements. The work reported in this dissertation starts by building a new perspective on context-awareness, in which the context includes, in principle, any information available in the ad hoc network but is restricted, in practice, to specific projections of the overall context. This work reports on the design and implementation of a middleware model that brings this notion of context to the application programmer. Another important aspect of the software engineering process is the ability to reason formally about the programs we create. This dissertation details initial steps to create formal reasoning mechanisms dedicated to the needs of context-aware applications. The results of this work simplify application development in ad hoc mobile networks from a design and implementation perspective and through formal reasoning