Context-awareness is an essential requirement for pervasive computingapplications, which enables them to adapt and perform tasks based on context.One of the adaptive features of context-awareness is contextualreconfiguration. Contextual reconfiguration involves discovering remoteservice(s) based on context and binding them to the application components torealize new behaviors, which may be needed to satisfy user needs or to enrichuser experience. One of the steps in the reconfiguration process involves aremote lookup to discover the service(s) based on context. This remote lookupprocess provides the largest contribution to reconfiguration time and this isdue to fact that the remote calls are much slower than local calls.Consequently, it affects system performance. In pervasive computingapplications, this may turn out to be undesirable in terms of user experience.Moreover, other distributed applications using the network may be affected asevery remote method call decreases the amount of bandwidth available on thenetwork. Various systems provide reconfiguration support and offer high-levelreconfiguration directives to develop adaptive context-aware applications, butdo not address this performance bottleneck. We address this issue and implementseamless caching of virtual stubs within our PCRA1 for improved performance. Inthis paper we present and describe our transparent caching support and alsoprovide its performance evaluation.
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