A Context Sharing Message Broker Architecture to Enhance Interoperability in Changeable Environments
Junichi Yamamoto, Hiroyuki Nakagawa, Ken Nakayama, Yasuyuki Tahara, Akihiko Ohsuga · 2009
With the growing number of mobile devices connected to the network, demand for appropriate services according to the situational contexts of users is increasing. However, building such context-aware applications is costly because both the environments of users in the real world and available services on the network are dynamically changing. In this paper, we propose a Context Sharing Message Broker Architecture which supports applications in changeable environments which cooperate with each other. The message broker provides a common context model which applications can share. A context model works not only as a common interface to the real world context, but also as a common interface to the applications which share the context model. Applications only access the context model, and they do not directly communicate with each other. This approach has three advantages; this architecture reduces the complexity of distributed context-aware systems; the architecture keeps applications independent from each other; applications can maintain their common context model cooperatively. These advantages enable applications to cooperate, and yet keep applications independent from each other.