Agent Based Quality Management Middleware for Context-Aware Pervasive Applications

Abstract

With the rapid development of the information technology, it is inevitable that the distributed mobile computing will evolve to the pervasive computing gradually whose final goal is fusing the information space composed of computers with the physical space in which the people are working and living in. To achieve this goal, one of the problems is how to continuously monitor/capture and interpret the environment related information efficiently to assure high context awareness. Many attentions have been paid to the research of the context-aware pervasive applications. However, most of them just use the raw context directly or take the Quality of Context (QoC) into account in just one or two aspect. Therefore, we propose a agent based quality management middleware to support QoC management through various layers. By the agents, we can configure different strategies to refinery raw context, discard duplicate and inconsistent context so as to protect and provide QoS-enriched context information of users to context-aware applications and services.