Dynamic Composition and Sharing of Context-aware Mobile Services – DYNAMOS

This is a TEKES project in collaboration with VTT. Our project partners are ICT-Turku, Suunto and TeliaSonera.

The main objective of the DYNAMOS project is to develop and evaluate a framework for providing mobile users with relevant services available in their daily surroundings, where relevance has a user-specific definition (e.g., cost, location, accessibility, etc.). In addition, the project investigates issues related to context-awareness, service-profile matching, and trust.

During the years 2004-2005, the DYNAMOS platform was implemented and evaluated. The user application running on mobile phones has been implemented using Java 2 Micro-Edition (J2ME) with Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) 1.0 and Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) 2.0 APIs. All the development was done using Nokia Series 60 phones. The developed platform enables mobile users i) to be proactively provided with a subset of relevant services available in the territory; ii) to generate and attach to the environment several types of contextual messages to be shared with other users; and iii) to annotate official service descriptions with public or private observations, comments, and ratings.

To evaluate the feasibility and usefulness of the proposed model, a sailing scenario of recreational sailboaters was selected. The application was evaluated in a field trial organized in the August 2005. This was held in the archipelago of the Helsinki region during a sailing regatta which is organized every year by a club of sailboaters of Helsinki. 9 sailboaters used the DYNAMOS application and reported their interest in this kind of application. In particular, this experience in the real field of action helped discover technical problems regarding context sensing and context management.

In the year 2006, the HIIT project development has focused on the design and development of a middleware for the provisioning of context information on smart phones, called Contory. To make context provisioning flexible and more reliable, Contory integrates multiple context provisioning strategies, namely internal sensors-based, external infrastructure-based, and distributed provisioning in ad hoc networks. Applications can request context information provided by Contory using a declarative query language which features on-demand, periodic, and event-based context queries. Experimental results obtained in a testbed of smart phones demonstrate the feasibility of this approach and quantify the cost of supporting context provisioning in terms of energy consumption.

People

• Kimmo Raatikainen (leader)

• Oriana Riva

Research group

• Mobile Computing Prof. Kimmo Raatikainen, Dr. Ken Rimey, Dr. Sasu Tarkoma

Main Publications

• O. Riva and S. Toivonen, The DYNAMOS Approach to Support Context-aware Service Provisioning in Mobile Environments, Elsevier Journal of Systems and Software, 2007. To Appear.

• O. Riva, Contory: A Middleware for the Provisioning of Context Information on Smart Phones , in the Proceedings of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 7th International Middleware Conference (Middleware'06), Melbourne (Australia), Nov 27 - Dec 1, 2006.

• O. Riva and S. Toivonen, A Hybrid Model of Context-aware Service Provisioning Implemented on Smart Phones, in the Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Services (ICPS'06), Lyon (France), 26-29 June 2006.

Links

See the project home page for more information and other publications.