Modeling and Controlling the Flow of Context Information in Context-aware Systems
Supervision
- Romain Rouvoy
- Lionel Seinturier
Host
ADAM Research GroupINRIA Lille - Nord Europe
Parc Scientifique de la Haute Borne
40, avenue Halley - Bat. A, Park Plaza
59650 Villeneuve d'Ascq - FRANCE
Context
INRIA, the national institute for research in computer science and control, is dedicated to fundamental and applied research in information and communication science and technology (ICST). Throughout its eight research centres located in seven major regions (Aquitaine, Bretagne, Lorraine, Île-de-France, Nord Pas-de-Calais, Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur, Rhône-Alpes), the Institute has a workforce of 3,700, 2,900 of whom are scientists from INRIA and its partner organizations. INRIA has an annual budget of 162 million euros, 20% of which comes from its own research contracts and development products. INRIA develops many partnerships with industry and fosters technology transfer and company foundations in the field of ICST - some eighty companies have been funded. Startups are financed in particular by INRIA Transfert, a subsidiary of INRIA that supports four startup funds. The international collaborations are based on an incentive strategy of welcoming and recruiting foreign students as well as developing strong exchanges between research scientists. Priority is given to geographic zones with strong growth: Europe, Asia and North America while maintaining reasonable cooperation with South America, Africa and Middle-East.
ADAM is a project-team of the INRIA Lille Nord Europe research center. Members of the ADAM project-team are also part of the LIFL (Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Lille) which is a joint unit between CNRS and the University of Lille 1. The objective of the ADAM (Adaptive Distributed Applications and Middleware) project-team is to provide a set of concepts, paradigms, approaches, frameworks, and tools based on advanced software engineering techniques such as CBSE (Component-Based Software Engineering), AOSD (Aspect-Oriented Software Development) or CAC (Context-Aware Computing) to build distributed adaptive software systems (applications and middleware) involving in multi-scale environments and to take into account the adaptation all along the software life-cycle. The ADAM project-team proposes solutions to manage the evolution of application requirements in terms of functional and extra-functional properties either at the level of execution platforms or at the design level. The ADAM project-team applies them to component-based and service-oriented computing distributed applications and platforms.
Project
Context-aware systems are increasingly shifting from trivial “sense and send” infrastructures to more advanced pervasive computing environments. These environments are characterized by hundreds of sensors and actuators exchanging context information to implement context-dependent behaviors [1,2]. In these environments, the flow of information propagated between sensors and actuators is i) highly heterogeneous (sensed/computed parameters, user preferences, etc.) and ii) impacted by contextual conditions (residual energy of nodes, sample rates, etc.). However, the current context-aware approaches [3,4,5] fail to control and harmonize the flow of context information depending on applications needs and resources constraints.
Therefore, the objective of this internship is to study the application of self-adaptation principles to context-aware systems, such as Wireless Sensor Networks or RFID-based Systems. The motivation is to control the flow of context information propagated in these environments by modeling policies capable of adapting the various dimensions of a context-aware system. These policies will target network infrastructures, application software, and node functionalities in order to provide an end-to-end adaptation of the system that satisfies multiple objectives (e.g., user requirements and sensor capabilities).
The results of this internship will be integrated as part of the COSMOS context-processing framework [6,7] and will be demonstrated in the context of the ICOM trade cluster (Infrastructure logicielle permettant le déploiement rapide d’applications de l’intelligence ambiante pour le commerce).
References
- Akyildiz, I., Kasimoglu, I., 2004. Wireless sensor and actor networks: Research challenges, Ad Hoc Networks 2 (4), pp. 351-367.
- Puccinelli, D., and Haenggi, M. 2005. Wireless sensor networks: applications and challenges of ubiquitous sensing. IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine, vol. 5, no. 3, 19-31.
- Chong, S, Krishnaswamy, S., and Loke, W., 2005. A context-aware approach to conserving energy in wireless sensor networks, In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference On Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (PerCom’05), Kauai Island, HI, USA.
- Huebscher, M. C., and McCann, J. A. 2004. Adaptive middleware for context-aware applications in smart homes. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Middleware for Pervasive and AdHoc Computing (MPAC).
- Rocha, R., and Endler, M., 2006. Context management in heterogeneous, evolving ubiquitous environments, IEEE Distributed Systems Online (DSO).
- Conan, D., Rouvoy, R., and Seinturier, L., 2007. Scalable processing of context information with COSMOS. In Proceedings of the 7th IFIP International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems (DAIS’07). p. 210–224 of LNCS 4531 (Springer). Paphos, Cyprus. June 5–8.
- Rouvoy, R., Conan, D., Seinturier, L., 2008. Software architecture patterns for a context-processing middleware framework. In IEEE Distributed Systems Online (DSO), vol. 9, no. 6.