A Uniform Device Information Access for Context-Aware Middleware

This paper presents a middleware for building context-aware applications. One of the main components, Device Information Access (DIA), is discussed in detail. Since many kinds of devices (e.g., RFID, GPS, Bluetooth, etc.) can be used to collect the context information, the middleware defines the Device Information Access component to communicate with different devices. A set of interfaces are devised in DIA, and the common functions such as getting and setting a data element are defined in the interfaces. For each device, we shall provide an implementation of the interfaces to communicate with the corresponding servers or software agents. DIA can communicate with the software agents or servers using various protocols such as RMI, Web Services, and REST. In this way the access to the hardware are encapsulated by the middleware and virtualized to the end-point applications. The architecture of the middleware and the functions of DIA are discussed, and an empirical application is also developed to validate our design.