Detection of behavioral contextual properties in asynchronous pervasive computing environments

Detection of contextual properties is one of the primary approaches to enabling context-awareness. In order to adapt to temporal evolution of the pervasive computing environment, context-aware applications often need to detect behavioral properties specified over the contexts. This problem is challenging mainly due to the intrinsic asynchrony of pervasive computing environments. However, existing schemes implicitly assume the availability of a global clock or synchronous coordination, thus not working in asynchronous environments. We argue that in pervasive computing environments, the concept of time needs to be reexamined. Toward this objective, we propose the Ordering Global Activity (OGA) algorithm, which detects behavioral contextual properties in asynchronous environments. The essence of our approach is to utilize the message causality and its on-the-fly coding as logical vector clocks. The OGA algorithm is implemented and evaluated based on the open-source context-aware middleware MIPA. The evaluation results show the impact of asynchrony on the detection of contextual properties, which justifies the primary motivation of our work. They also show that OGA can achieve accurate detection of contextual properties in dynamic pervasive computing environments.