Decentralized constraint checking for pervasive computing

As computing becomes more pervasive, smart computing devices are increasingly connected. Applications provide pervasive services based on contexts of their host devices as well as other connected devices. However, the use of contexts commonly follows a centralized approach, i.e., copying all required contexts of other devices to one device that performs a computing task. This causes space overhead and privacy threats to resource-limited, personal devices. In this paper, we propose a constraint-based approach to systematically decentralizing constraint-expressed computing tasks to connected devices. This approach is expressive to support pervasive computing tasks such as situation evaluation to complete in a device-collaborating way. We show that the approach is effective for reducing space cost and protecting device privacy in pervasive computin