Dynamix: An open plug-and-play context framework for android

Abstract

Today's mobile devices represent exceptional foundations for wide-area Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, the vast heterogeneity of real-world environments makes it challenging for applications to sense, understand and adapt to the user's continually evolving context. We're investigating a new community-based approach for context-aware computing, where advanced context sensing capabilities are dynamically deployed to mobile devices as plug-ins, and are made available to applications through only a few lines of code. Towards this end, we're developing Dynamix, an open plug-and-play context framework for Android. Dynamix runs as lightweight background service on the user's mobile device, modeling context information from the environment using the device itself as a sensing, processing and communications platform. Mobile applications request context support from Dynamix using simple application programming interfaces (APIs). Dynamix automatically discovers, downloads and installs the plug-ins needed for a given context sensing task. When the user changes environments, new or updated plug-ins can be deployed to the device at runtime, without the need to restart the application or framework. Dynamix comes with a growing collection of ready-made plug-ins, and provides open software developments kits (SDKs) and a scalable repository architecture, which enable 3rd party developers to quickly create and share new plug-ins types with the community. This paper presents the Dynamix approach, describes our prototype implementation and presents promising performance evaluation results.