Design and Implementation of the Pervaho Middleware for Mobile Context-Aware Applications

Context-aware applications offer a great potential for the future of mobile computing. In order to be developed in an optimal way, such applications need appropriate middleware services. This paper introduces Pervaho, an integrated middleware aimed specifically for supporting the development and testing of mobile context-aware applications. To illustrate the use of Pervaho, we walk through the development of a concrete mobile context-aware application and show how it can be elegantly built on top of Pervaho´s location-based publish/subscribe service. We also illustrate how a specialized mobility testing tool significantly simplifies the process of testing proximity-based semantics. We then present the implementation of Pervaho, which is based on a set of communication protocols geared at mesh networks. Finally, we provide a performance analysis of our implementation.