RCSM Middleware Research Project
Current Status

Since the RCSM project started in September, 2001, the following new techniques have been developed by the project team:

v    Situation-awareness

o  Situation-Aware Interface Definition Language (SA-IDL) for specifying situation-aware requirements of situation-aware applications in ubicomp environments

o  Automatically generated situation analyzer based on SA-IDL specifications for recognizing situations and adapting application behavior based on situations

o  An adaptive, lightweight and energy-efficient context discovery protocol for discovering, managing and acquiring context data from various sources

v    Protocols for ad hoc communications in ubicomp environments

o      An energy-efficient object discovery protocol for situation-aware communication in ubicomp environments

o      A context-sensitive protocol for dynamically integrating mobile devices into computational infrastructures

v    Situation-Aware Ephemeral Group (SAEG) Management

o      Energy-efficient group view maintenance protocol for situation-aware ephemeral group

o   S-REMiT and G-REMiT algorithms for energy-efficient multicasting in wireless ad hoc networks

v    Autonomous coordination for information dissemination

o      A scalable cellular-automata-based coordination scheme for situation-aware coordinated information dissemination among mobile devices

 These new techniques have been implemented in our RCSM prototype, consisting of RCSM Object Request Broker (R-ORB), Situation-Aware ADaptive object Container (SA-ADC), SAEG service, and Information Dissemination Service (IDS). We have developed an effective approach to developing situation-aware applications in ubicomp environments using RCSM prototype. Using this development approach, we have developed a suite of applications on our Smart Classroom test bed, which uses mobile devices with situation-awareness and ad hoc communication capabilities to facilitate effective teaching and group learning among college students.  These applications are currently being used and evaluated by students in CSE 462, “Software Engineering Project II”, at Arizona State University.

A set of software packages, including the source codes and documentations of RCSM core components and services, and Smart Classroom applications, are available upon request (see Software packages).

Part of the research results have been published in a number of journals and conference proceedings (see Publications).