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Within the domain of pervasive computing, context-awareness has commonly been defined as the ability of an application to adapt itself to its dynamic environment. The context of an application is defined as any information or service in the application's surroundings that may influence its current state or behaviour. In this research, we focus on the influence of such context on the communications between the entities of a software system.
Our observation is that in an interaction between two entities, the behaviour of the message receiver may not only depend on the context itself, but also on the context of the sender. We have illustrated this idea in a high level cell phone scenario.
We claim that in order to deal with context-dependent communications in mobile networks, we need a model that satisfies the following conditions:
At the PROG lab, we are currently exploring different language constructs for the develompent of context-aware applications. The construct presented in this page is called Split Objects (Bardou et al, ECOOP 1996). In such a model, application entities are composed of roles (known as viewpoints) which represent the different behaviours the entity can adopt according to their context. A role is a particular point of view on an entity that has an identification and a partial definition of that entity. In addition, a role can specialise another role so that different roles can share behaviour. The model's message sending protocol allows the specification of the role the receiver should adopt to respond to the message. Hence, if context-dependent behaviour is modelled as roles, an application could adapt to its context by just assuming the appropriate role.
Different We refer the interested reader
A Role-Based Implementation of Context-Dependent Communications Using Split Objects. Jorge Vallejos, Peter Ebraert, Brecht Desmet. In “Proceedings of the workshop on Revival of Dynamic Languages, collocated with ECOOP 2006, Nantes, France”. [ download ]