ContextWare Support for Network and Service Composition and Self-adaptation

A crucial prerequisite for building context-aware networks is an integrated infrastructure for sensing, processing, managing and disseminating network context information to network entities and user-facing applications. This requirement is especially important in ambient networks, a class of networks that exploit the inherent heterogeneity seen in today’s wireless networks in order to share diverse resources and services across different but cooperating networks. We discuss ContextWare, our architectural solution for making ambient networks context-aware, and present a programmable approach to its realization. We relate some of our experiences in building and validating a prototype and demonstrating its support for network and service composition, as well as self-adaptation, using a reference scenario.