ALADIN: An Extensible Ubiquitous Computing Infrastructure

1st Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Andreas Schrader (ISNM)

2nd Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Bernhard Jung (ISNM)

Context-aware software is increasingly capable of responding intelligently to an individual’s change in location, encounters with “smart” objects, focus of attention and more. Realizing these types of capabilities often requires a level of coordination not typically present in traditional software. Sophisticated ubiquitous computing infrastructures have been developed to provide this required coordination and help reduce the overall cost and complexity of creating, deploying and managing context-aware software services. However, these approaches are often prohibitively complex and highly dependant on restrictive service models and specific underlying hardware. Moreover, these systems often do not provide means for easily extending or changing infrastructure components during runtime, which reduces their ability to accommodate additional features or physical environments. This thesis presents Aladin, an extensible ubiquitous computing infrastructure. Aladin addresses the needs of context-aware software with an open service model and flexible plug-in framework which allows feature extensions at runtime. Aladin is specifically designed to reduce infrastructure complexity and deliver a wide range of context-aware services in heterogeneous environments. We believe that this type of architecture is essential for exploring new types of context-aware services and encouraging the adoption of these systems outside the research laboratory.