Decentralized checking context inconsistency in ubiquitous mobile computing environments

Contexts are often noisy in ubiquitous mobile computing environments due to user mobility, unreliable wireless connectivity and resource constraints. Various schemes have been proposed to check context inconsistency for ubiquitous mobile applications. However, most of them require central control. This requirement inhibits their working in ubiquitous mobile environments, which are characterized by the asynchronous coordination among computing devices. In this paper, we propose DCCI scheme – Decentralized Checking Context Inconsistency for ubiquitous mobile applications by exploiting the preference-based locality that denotes context inconsistency occurs among the nodes that impose various restrictions on the same context. According to this locality, DCCI constructs a preference-based shortcut structure to check inconsistency within shortcuts. Extensive experiments show that DCCI can accurately and efficiently check context inconsistency in a fully distributed manner.