Tuples On The Air: A Middleware for Context-Aware Computing in Dynamic Networks

We present TOTA (“Tuples On The Air”), a novelmiddleware for supporting adaptive context-awareapplication in dynamic network scenarios. The key ideain TOTA is to rely on spatially distributed tuples forboth representing contextual information andsupporting uncoupled and adaptive interactionsbetween application components. The middlewarepropagates tuples across a network on the basis ofapplication-specific patterns and adaptively re-shapesthe resulting distributed structures accordingly tochanges in the network scenario. Applicationcomponents can locally “sense” these structures andexploit them to acquire contextual information andcarry on complex coordination activities in an adaptiveway. Several examples show the effectiveness of theTOTA approach.