Group Context

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Group Context

Context-awareness in dynamic and unpredictable environments is a well-studied problem, and many approaches handle sensing, understanding, and acting upon context information. These environments consist of mobile devices connected by wireless links. Entities in these environments are not in isolation, and oftentimes the manner in which entities coordinate depends on some (implicit) notion of their shared context. We are motivated by the need to explicitly construct notions of the context of a group that can support better coordination of entities of the group. We have to date attacked three interrelated challenges. First we have identified an efficient representation of context (both of an individual and of a group) that can be shared across wireless connections without incurring a significant communication overhead. Second we have provided precise semantics for different types of groups, each with compelling use cases in these dynamic computing environments. Finally, we have defined protocols for efficiently computing groups in a distributed manner. We have generated both analytical characterizations of our approaches and a prototype implementation of context distribution and group formation.

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The code we used to generate the simulation results is available here. This zip file contains the code for the BFShim and a simple application that uses the shim; the complete simulation tarball (very large) and execution instructions are available upon request.