Context oriented data staging for mobile environments

In today’s computing environments every user interacts with several dozens of highly heterogeneous devices. These devices are frequently arranged in contexts; in any given context the user is interacting with a specific set of devices. Context oriented data staging is the problem of delivering up-to-date data to the devices of the current context, following the movement of the user between the contexts. Additional constraints are provided by factors such as the existence of intermediary contexts with low resource availability, the heterogeneous and potentially intermittent network connections of the devices, and the users preference for certain applications. We present a mathematical model of context based data staging by extending existing models with concepts of context, document type and preferred application. A set of hybrid algorithms, relying on heuristics and rule-based systems are proposed. We present an implementation of the algorithms, an experimental harness and typical scenarios. Simulation results prove the feasibility of the approach.