Context Distribution System through brokers and simple APIs. (5th December 2006) - Cohen, Rami
In order to allow fast and efficient development, deployment, and management of Context Aware Services (CASs), a global system that allows the services to gain access to context information should be created, maintained, and managed. In this paper, we study the requirements of such a context distribution system. We deal with the architectural decisions regarding the definition of context items, the way context information becomes available to the CASs and the algorithmic aspects of disseminating this information. Our results indicate that a modular approach in which context information is provided in many network locations by brokers through an open simple API is both powerful enough to provide the required context information, and simple enough to be easily implemented.