A Wide-area Context-awareness Approach for Android

Mobile users increasingly expect software applications to adapt fluidly across a range of everyday situations, environments and hardware platforms. Although contextual information is recognized as a foundation of self-adapting software, context modeling middleware is often prohibitively complex and limited to small-scale deployments. This paper introduces Dynamix, a wide-area context-awareness approach for Android. Dynamix simplifies mobile application development through an OSGi-based middleware framework that runs as a background service on a user's device, modeling context information from the environment using the device itself as a sensing, processing and communications platform. Context modeling is performed by plug-ins, which are provisioned to the device over-the-air during runtime. User privacy is maintained by a novel context firewall. Dynamix defines an open plug-in model and repository architecture, which enable external domain experts to share context plug-ins with the mobile developer community. This paper presents the foundations of our approach along with encouraging preliminary results.