CoMiHoC: A Middleware Framework for Context Management in MANET Environment

Advances in wireless and sensing technology and the proliferation of context-aware systems have highlighted the requirement to reduce the complexity of system development by establishing a middleware framework of context management. The middleware aims to manage different aspects of context and location management as well as situation reasoning and other related tasks. In this paper, a middleware framework of context management and situation reasoning in MANET environment is proposed. It includes components to model and reason about contexts and situations, to construct location models and estimate the relevance of contexts used for situation reasoning. We also incorporate On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP) as the underlying messaging protocol among the collaborative hosts to deal with MANET communication issues. We discuss implementation and experimentation issues of the framework in personal digital assistance (PDA) devices which form the ad hoc network as proof-of-concept of the framework. Our preliminary implementation and experimentation shows the capability of the framework to work in such limited devices and to perform the designed capabilities of the middleware.