Solar: An Open Platform for Context-Aware Mobile Applications

Emerging pervasive computing technologies transform the way we live and work by embedding computation in our surrounding environment. To avoid increasing complexity, and allow the user to concentrate on her tasks, applications in a pervasive computing environment must automatically adapt to their changing context, including the user state and the physical and computational environment in which they run. Solar is a middleware platform to help these “context-aware” applications aggregate desired context from heterogeneous sources and to locate environmental services depending on the current context. By moving most of the context computation into the infrastructure, Solar allows applications to run on thin mobile clients more effectively. By providing an open framework to enable dynamic injection of context processing modules, Solar shares these modules across many applications, reducing application development cost and network traffic. By distributing these modules across network nodes and reconfiguring the distribution at runtime, Solar achieves parallelism and online load balancing.