Edinburgh Napier University

  In pervasive environments, context-aware applications require a global knowledge of the context information distributed in different spatial domains in order to establish context-based interactions. Therefore, the design of distributed storage, retrieval, and dissemination mechanisms of context information across domains becomes vital. In such environments, we envision the necessity of collaboration between different context servers distributed in different domains; thus, the need for generic APIs and protocol allowing context information exchange between different entities: context servers, context providers, and context consumers. As a solution this paper proposes ubique, a distributed middleware for contextaware computing that allows applications to maintain domain-based context interests to access context information about users, places, events, and things - all made available by or brokered through the home domain server. This paper proposes also a new cross-domain protocol for context management which ensures the privacy and the efficiency of context information dissemination. It has been robustly built upon the Jabber protocol which is a widely adopted open protocol for instant messaging and is designed for near real-time communication. Simulation and experimentation results show that ubique framework well supports robust cross-domain context management and collaboration