Context-aware state management for supporting mobility in a pervasive environment
Pauline Siu Po-lam · 2004
of thesis entitled “Context-Aware State Management for Supporting Mobility in a Pervasive Environment” submitted by SIU Po Lam Pauline for the degree of Master of Philosophy at The University of Hong Kong in August 2004 Mobility and invisibility are the intrinsic characteristics of the pervasive computing environment. In such an environment, users are of high mobility, who roam around and access various services through resources that are available to them on the spot. These resources are heterogeneous, embedded in their surroundings, and vary from location to location. Therefore computing services should be able to adapt to different computing contexts, and it is essential for the system to support mobility and make the changing context invisible, so that users can continuously interact with the available services anytime, anywhere, and without disruption. Researchers have worked on mobility support for many years. Mobility has been considered in many aspects, such as user mobility, device mobility, and service mobility. However, little research has so far been conducted on the issue of adaptation. There are some researchers who have worked on adaptation methods, such as data adaptation, code adaptation and functionality adaptation. But they have rarely considered the issue of mobility. Research into mobility or adaptation alone is unlikely to achieve the goals of supporting mobility and achieving invisibility in the pervasive computing environment. Current mobility support would move an application by shipping its code with existing states. On the other hand, adaptability support is mostly concerned with the change of data or code, but very little with states. The state, i.e. the current status of the application, actually plays an important role in both mobility and adaptability, and it binds the two together.