Research And Implementation Of Context-Aware Applicational Middleware For Mobile Terminals

The popularization of mobile terminals and the maturity of internet technology facilitate the development of mobile internet smart terminal applications, and create an environment for designers to provide users with more personalized services by utilizing context-aware techniques effectively. However, developing a mobile context-aware application is still a complex work that would encounter many problems. In the mobile terminal platform, the context data provided by each sensor needs to be analyzed in time by applying different mechanisms of context acquisition, context processing and context monitoring. The whole analyzing work not only increases the developer’s burden, but also challenges the mobile terminal’s processing capability. Moreover, due to the diversity of mobile operating systems and screen resolutions, application could not achieve cross-platform deployment with no changes of source code. All of these factors restrict the development and the deployment of mobile applications. In order to reduce the complexity of creating mobile context-aware applications, this paper proposed a context-aware applicational middleware for mobile terminals to enable context centralized processing and solve the cross-platform compatibility issue.This paper analyzed the context-aware related research work and the characteristics of mobile terminal environment, and then proposed the architecture of the middleware system. The context processing module of the middleware hides the context processing details, which involve of context acquisition, context storage, context aggregation and context analyzation. It facilitates the development of context-aware applications, while reduces the energy consumption on smart terminals. Moreover, the interface adaptive module of the middleware built on BAE engine enables the widget applications to be adaptive on different terminals with diverse screen resolutions and operating systems (like Android, OMS, and Symbian) to achieve cross-platform deployment. At last, the performance of the middleware is evaluated by developing two context-aware widget applications. And the future research plan is discussed.