Solar: Towards a Flexible and Scalable Data-Fusion Infrastructure for Ubiquitous Computing

摘要

As we embed more computers into our daily environment, ubiquitous computing promises to make them less noticeable and to avoid information overload. We see, however, few ubiquitous applications that are able to adapt to the dynamics of user, physical, and computational context. The challenge is to allow applications flexible access to these sources, and yet scale to thousands of devices and sensors. In this paper we introduce our proposed infrastructure, SOLAR. In SOLAR, information sources produce events. Applications may subscribe to interesting sources directly, or they may instantiate and subscribe to a tree of operators that filter, transform, merge and aggregate events. Applications use a subscription language to describe the tree, based on event streams registered in a context-sensitive naming hierarchy. SOLAR is flexible: modular operators can be composed to produce new event streams. SOLAR is scalable: it distributes operators across host called Planets, and it re-uses common subgraphs in the operator network.