ICROSS: Toward a scalable infrastructure for cross-domain context management

With the development of pervasive computing techniques, the world will be filled with interconnected context-aware domains (e.g., homes, offices, hospitals, etc.). While the previous studies focused solely on the management of contexts produced in a single domain, in this paper we discuss the challenges to be addressed for cross-domain context management. By analyzing the requirements from several scenarios, we identify two context producer-consumer patterns in multi-domain environments. Furthermore, to deal with the mobile entity problem raised in cross-domain context sharing, a transparent query mechanism that enables applications to obtain context information about mobile entities from remote domains is proposed. Two prototype applications - smart home and community services in a smart campus - have been developed to demonstrate the key features and usefulness of cross-domain context management. Initial experiments have also been conducted to evaluate the performance of our system.