Reasoning about context-awareness in the presence of mobility

Context-awareness is emerging as an important computing paradigm designed to address the special needs of applications that must accommodate or exploit the highly dynamic environments that occur in the presence of physical or logical mobility. A number of formal models are available for reasoning about concurrency. Models designed to capture the specifics of mobility are fewer but still well represented (e.g., Mobile Ambients, π-Calculus, and Mobile UNITY). These models do not, however, provide constructs necessary for explicit modeling of context-aware interactions. This paper builds upon earlier efforts on state-based formal reasoning about mobility and explores the process by which a model such as Mobile UNITY can be transformed to explicitly capture context- awareness. Starting with an examination of the essential features of context-aware systems, this paper explores a range of constructs designed to facilitate a highly decoupled style of programming among context-aware components. The result of this exploration is a model called Context UNITY.