Merino: An Intelligent Environment Architecture for Scalable Context Processing

This paper describes the the Merino architecture for scalable management of an intelligent environment. We define requirements for such an architecture. We then review previous work that has informed our design and which has addressed aspects of some of these requirements. The core of the architecture is its abstraction layers: the core Sensors and Device Layers; the next level of abstraction in the Context and Device Abstraction Layers; and the highest abstraction level, the Smart Environment Agent Layer. These are unified by the Context Repository and User Model. After describing this, we show how the scalable distribution of context and user model information is managed in terms of a hierachy of administrative domains. We describe the prototype implementation of Merino.