Towards Realizing Global Scalability in Context-Aware Systems

Buchholz, T., Linnhoff–Popien, C., Towards Realizing Global Scalability in Context–Aware Systems In Location- and Context-Awareness. Proceedings of the First International Workshop, LoCA 2005, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (3479), pages 26-39, Springer, Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, Mai, 2005.

Most of research in ubiquitous computing focus on application where all entities involved in a user session are located in each other’s spatial proximity. This has been coined as “localized scalability”. However there are application where the users are not collocated. Thus, interactions between distant entities are needed. In these situation arise the question of how global scalability in context-aware systems can be reached. This paper classifies Context-Aware Services (CASs) according to their scalability needs and reviews context provision and service provision infrastructure with regard to their scalability.

Scale consists of a numerical (number of users, context sources), a geographical (distance between the farthest nodes), and an administrative dimension (number of organizations). A system is scalable if users, objects and services can be added, if it can be scattered over a larger area, it if the chain of value creation can be divided among more organizations without the system suffering loss of performance or increased administrative complexity. Scalability problems arise especially if dynamic properties of target object (target context) and of objects between the user’s current position and the targets’ position (transition context) are included into the recommendation given to the user.

Good candidates as a suitable CAS provision infrastructure are grids, P2P networks, and CDNs. These systems need to be coupled with a large-scale context provision infrastructure (providing homogeneous access interface of context information).

Relation to my thesis: As I am at applying ubiquity in the real-world, I am interested in the scalability of ubiquitous technologies. This papers the properties to scale from local towards global.