4th International ICST Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services

Research Article

Application Based Distance Measurement for Context Retrieval in Ubiquitous Computing

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/MOBIQ.2007.4450999,
        author={Shaxun  Chen and Tao  Gu and Xianping  Tao and Jian  Lu},
        title={Application Based Distance Measurement for Context Retrieval in Ubiquitous Computing},
        proceedings={4th International ICST Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={MOBIQUITOUS},
        year={2008},
        month={2},
        keywords={clustering  context distance  context retrieval  ubiquitous computing},
        doi={10.1109/MOBIQ.2007.4450999}
    }
    
  • Shaxun Chen
    Tao Gu
    Xianping Tao
    Jian Lu
    Year: 2008
    Application Based Distance Measurement for Context Retrieval in Ubiquitous Computing
    MOBIQUITOUS
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/MOBIQ.2007.4450999
Shaxun Chen1,*, Tao Gu2,*, Xianping Tao1,*, Jian Lu1,*
  • 1: State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, P.R.China
  • 2: Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore
*Contact email: csx@ics.nju.edu.cn, tgu@i2r.a-star.edu.sg, txp@ics.nju.edu.cn, lj@nju.edu.cn

Abstract

Building large-scale smart environments is one of the long-term goals of ubiquitous computing. The widespread of context information in such environments necessitates an effective context retrieval mechanism. This paper proposes a novel context retrieval method based on applications’ query patterns. We propose high dimensional vector to model contexts from applications’ perspective, and apply the normalized inner product of high dimensional vectors to measure context distance. Contexts with similar query patterns are clustered into the same group. To improve the performance of context retrieval, we build distributed indices on each node to speed up a local search, and create shortcuts based on clustering results to facilitate query routing. We show how our proposed methods can be applied to existing context retrieval mechanisms. Our experimental results show that our method can significantly reduce retrieval cost.