A middleware based layered framework for the quality management of context-aware pervasive applications

With the rapid development of pervasive computing, more and more sensors based applications have been implemented. And many problems occur in the process of providing stable basis for the normal working of these systems. One of them is how to continuously monitor/capture and interpret the environment related information efficiently to assure high context awareness. Many attentions have been paid to the research of the context-aware pervasive applications. However, most of them just use the raw context directly or take the Quality of Context (QoC) into account in just one or two steps. Therefore, we propose a layered middleware based context-aware framework that support QoC management through various layers. By this framework we can refinery raw context, discard duplicate and inconsistent context so as to protect and provide QoS-enriched context information of users to context-aware applications and services.