A semantic approach for scalable and self-organized context-aware systems

Abstract

In this thesis, we investigate and study on a set of core infrastructure services to simplify the task of building reliable and scalable context-aware applications in pervasive computing environments. Particularly, we focus on two problems: Providing a scalable and robust context lookup service in wide-area networks, and an efficient context processing mechanism. To tackle these problems, we propose a semantic P2P overlay network for efficient context lookup, and a distributed logical reasoning mechanism for context interpretation. We carry out comprehensive simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed overlay network. The results show that our system possesses good scalability, better search efficiency and low overlay maintenance overhead. We also develop a working prototype system to demonstrate how our proposed techniques work in a practical way, and build several typical context-aware applications on top of our prototype. Our experiences show that our system works effectively in a real-world setting and the application development process is greatly simplified.