A Declarative Approach to Agent-Centered Context Aware Computing in Ad Hoc
Wireless Environments

Gruia-Catalin Roman
Christine Julien
Amy Murphy

Much of the current work on context-aware computing relies on
information directly available to an application via context sensors
on its local host, e.g., user profile, host location, time of day,
resource availability, and quality of service measurements.  We
propose a new notion of context, which includes in principle any
information reachable via the ad hoc network infrastructure but is
restricted in practice to specific views of the overall context.  The
contents of each view will be defined in terms of data, objects, or
events exhibiting certain properties, associated with particular
application components, residing on particular hosts, and part of some
restricted subnet.  Location, distance, movement profile, access
rights, and a lot more will be available for use in view
specifications.  The underlying system infrastructure will interpret
the view specifications and continuously update the contents of
user-defined views despite dynamic changes in the specifications,
state transitions at the application level, mobility of hosts in the
physical space, and the migration of code among hosts.