Modeling the Context-Awareness Service in an Aspect-Oriented Middleware for AmI

Ambient Intelligence applications are gradually becoming integrated into our environment and will be deployed in a wide range of small devices and appliances. Middleware platforms will be useful to express the different requirements of these devices in terms of their commonalities and variabilities. These ambient intelligence applications should be highly reconfigurable in order to deal with changes in the environment. Consequently, one of the services that the middleware has to provide is precisely this managing of the environment i.e., the context. Context-awareness and context adaptation are crosscutting concerns that cannot be well-encapsulated in single modules using traditional technologies, which hinders application design maintenance and reusability. In order to overcome these problems we use of Aspect-Oriented Software Development for modeling the context-aware service. There are several classifications of the different kinds of context at application level. We specify these context types at middleware level and model them using aspects. Finally, we compare the aspect oriented version of context-awareness versus the non aspect-oriented one.