Context Oriented Software Middleware

TL;DR

The paper introduces COSM, a middleware that enables context-aware, self-adaptive, and dependable software in mobile environments by dynamically composing context-dependent components based on runtime context.

Contribution

It presents a generic, platform-independent adaptation engine that distinguishes context-dependent and independent functionalities for flexible software adaptation.

Findings

Demonstrated effectiveness through a case study

Supports dynamic, policy-based adaptation evaluation

Enhances dependability in mobile computing environments

Abstract

Our middleware approach, Context-Oriented Software Middleware (COSM), supports context-dependent software with self-adaptability and dependability in a mobile computing environment. The COSM-middleware is a generic and platform-independent adaptation engine, which performs a runtime composition of the software's context-dependent behaviours based on the execution contexts. Our middleware distinguishes between the context-dependent and context-independent functionality of software systems. This enables the COSM-middleware to adapt the application behaviour by composing a set of context-oriented components, that implement the context-dependent functionality of the software. Accordingly, the software dependability is achieved by considering the functionality of the COSM-middleware and the adaptation impact/costs. The COSM-middleware uses a dynamic policy-based engine to evaluate the adaptation outputs and verify the fitness of the adaptation output with the application's objectives, goals and the architecture quality attributes. These capabilities are demonstrated through an empirical evaluation of a case study implementation.