Ambient multicasting : context-based service delivery to ad-hoc communities

The increasing adoption of sensor rich mobile devices supported by high-speed network connectivity has transformed our computing and communication environment. Context- aware services and applications are making their way into our daily lives. Physical spaces are now transforming into smart spaces with embedded services, thus bringing together the real and virtual worlds. These trends coupled with the unprecedented success of social networking websites have opened new vistas. Even though the social networking platform allows interaction amongst group of friends or contacts, it lacks in dynamically recognising potential group of users based on their physical activity or commonality, i.e. their context. Furthermore, they fail to leverage the multicast service delivery capabilities of the underlying communication networks. This thesis proposes a context aware group service delivery model called ambient multicast for a group of users, called ad-hoc communities, which are dynamically identified based on their context information. This work establishes its basis on the sociological and technical discussion of groups and their dynamics. The availability of context information acts as the bridge between the groups which exist in the real world and the more static virtual groups. Contextual changes over the course of time, result in continuous disintegration of existing groups and formation of new ones. An important challenge in supporting such ad-hoc communities is the availability of a generic context aware model, which is suitable for mobile users. This research proposes a broker- consumer-provider based context aware architecture which decouples the application logic from the context acquisition and dissemination model. The proposed architecture is based on service oriented architecture principles and supports gradual introduction of context providers and context consumers. The application development cycle is narrow because the context discovery, acquisition and aggregation complexity is hidden behind the broker component.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo