A Group-Aware Middleware for Ubiquitous Computing Environments

In this paper, we present, Active Surroundings, a groupaware middleware infrastructure for ubiquitous computing environments. Our system focuses on two key issues: group-awareness and transparent application reconfiguration. To achieve these goals, Active Surroundings is composed of four key component: environment sensing for abstraction of environment status and changes and tracing movements of a group of users, context management for collection, identification, and representation of user intention and resolution of group context conflict, context-aware service discovery for finding appropriate service based on context information, and dynamic reconfiguration support for dynamic reconfiguration of service objects with minimal overhead.