Context-aware state management for ubiquitous applications

Abstract

In a ubiquitous computing environment, users continuously access computing services and interact with smart spaces, while moving from one place to another. Application migration, therefore, is an important and necessary feature. State capturing, migration and restoration play a significant role to enable application migration. However, current software systems usually capture the state at the source and restore it in the destination as it is, without any modification. We believe that application migration in the ubiquitous computing environment has to be context-aware. In this paper, we introduce a context-aware state capturing and restoring mechanism that can achieve context-aware application migration. Our context-aware migration scheme has been implemented in our Sparkle Pervasive Environment, and we demonstrate it with a Universal Browser Application. We believe with this mechanism, applications can be more adaptive to the changing environment as the internal program states will be processed to suit the new context environment at the destination device and mobile code could be brought in from the network to adapt to the new execution context. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.