Context-Sensitive Data Structures Supporting Software Development in Ad Hoc Mobile Settings
Jamie Payton · Open Scholarship Institutional Repository (Washington University in St. Louis) · 2003
Context-aware computing, an emerging paradigm in which applications sense and adapt their behavior to changes in their operational environment, is key to developing dependable software for use in the often unpredictable settings of ad hoc networks. However, designing an application which gathers, maintains, and adapts to context can be a difficult undertaking, even for a seasoned programmer. Our goal is to simplify the programming task by hiding such issues from the programmer, allowing one to quickly and reliably produce a context-aware application for use in ad hoc networks. With this goal in mind, we introduce a novel abstraction called context-sensitive data structures (CSDS). The programmer interacts with the CSDS through a familiar programming interface, without direct knowledge of the context gathering and maintenance tasks that occur behind the scenes. In this paper, we define a model of context-sensitive data structures and present protocols which enable the programmer to construct and main-tain a CSDS as a distributed structure over a mobile ad hoc network in a state of flux.