A Context-Aware Communication Platform for Smart Objects

To appear: Proc. 2nd International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2004) c © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004 Abstract. When smart objects participate in context-aware applications, changes in their real-world environment can have a significant impact on underlying networking structures. This paper presents a communication platform for smart objects that takes an object’s current realworld context into account and adapts networking structures accordingly. The platform provides (1) mechanisms for specifying and implementing context-aware communication services, (2) a tuplespace-based communication abstraction for inter-object collaboration, and (3) support for linking communication and context-recognition layers. For specifying context-aware communication services, a high-level description language, called SICL, and a compiler that generates corresponding code for smart objects were realized. The tuplespace-based infrastructure layer for interobject collaboration hides low-level communication issues from higher layers and facilitates collaborative context recognition between cooperating objects. The paper also presents examples of context-aware communication services and evaluates the platform on the basis of a concrete implementation on an embedded device platform.