ConsView: Towards Application-Specific Consistent Context Views

Detecting and resolving context inconsistency is critical to pervasive computing applications and infrastructures. Context inconsistency occurs when an application perceives contexts that breach predefined consistency constraints. This can drive an application to behave abnormally or even cause failure. Existing work commonly assumes the presence of a single application suffering from context inconsistency, such that specific repair actions can be taken to resolve the inconsistency for this application. However, when multiple applications run on the same infrastructure, they may impose conflicting requirements on resolving context inconsistency. In this paper, we propose a novel view-based approach ConsView to address such conflicting requirements. In ConsView, each application has a specific view to its own contexts that satisfy its own requirement on resolving context inconsistency. Such views are called consistent context views. We discuss the challenges of doing so and our ideas for addressing them. We implemented a prototype infrastructure supporting consistent context views, and evaluated it experimentally with simulated applications of real-life settings. The results confirmed the effectiveness and efficiency of our ConsView approach.