Ambient Middleware for Context-Awareness (AMiCA)

Recent advances in wireless networking technologies and the growing success of mobile computing devices are enabling new classes of applications which present challenging problems for designers. Distributed applications running in a mobile environment are often subject to widely varying qualities of service from the underlying infrastructure. The objective of the work outlined in this research plan is the development of an Ambient Middleware framework for Context-awareness wireless devices which will offer new opportunities for application developers and end users convenience. Context and context-awareness have been central issues in Ambient Intelligent (AmI) research for the last decade. Ambient Intelligent systems and applications represent extremely complex and heterogeneous distributed systems, composed of hardware and software components and the need for middleware to seamlessly bind these components together is well recognised. Research shows that existing middleware solutions need to evolve, thus permitting the dissemination of omnipresent attributes within the Ubiquitous and Pervasive computing environments of today. To determine the effectiveness of this middleware framework, a cloud computing based Ambient Intelligent application will be developed which will integrate with research in the areas of Swarm Intelligence, Bayesian networks and the semantic web.