On the application of epidemical spreading in collaborative context-aware computing

Abstract

Pervasive Computing Research Group, Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, University of Athens, Panepistimiopolis, Ilissia, 15784, Athens, Greece. We investigate the very important concept of collaborative context awareness. Applications operating in nodes with spatial proximity and network connectivity exchange the contextual information (context) captured by their sensors (or other similar data sources). Such scheme improves the characteristics of the context aware application (e.g., robustness). The exchange of context in our model is progressed beyond a simple flooding scheme. We adopt an epidemic model, which relays information in a stochastic manner. In our model, nodes have a reasoning capability, which can further process and transform the incoming context. The derived context can be relayed throughout the network. This multi-epidemic model relies on semantic dependencies, which are modeled through a hierarchical representation scheme. We investigate the efficiency of the proposed architecture in light of different spreading parameters. Our simulations take into account the temporal validity of the exchanged context (i.e., relayed information remains valid for a certain period of time), the status of the sensing elements and the mobility of nodes. Our findings are quite promising for the emerging area of context aware application engineering.