Title
SIP-based context distribution: does aggregation pay off?
Abstract
Context-aware applications need quickly access to current context information, in order to adapt their behavior before this context changes. To achieve this, the context distribution mechanism has to timely discover context sources that can provide a particular context type, then acquire and distribute context information from these sources to the applications that requested this type of information. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art context distribution mechanisms according to identified requirements, then introduces a resource list-based subscription/notification mechanism for context sharing. This SIP-based mechanism enables subscriptions to a resource list containing URIs of multiple context sources that can provide the same context type and delivery of aggregated notifications containing context updates from each of these sources. Aggregation of context is thought to be important as it reduces the network traffic between entities involved in context distribution. However, it introduces an additional delay due to waiting for context updates and their aggregation. To investigate if this aggregation actually pays off, we measured and compared the time needed by an application to receive context updates after subscribing to a particular resource list (using RLS) versus after subscribing to each of the individual context sources (using SIMPLE) for different numbers of context sources. Our results show that RLS aggregation outperforms the SIMPLE presence mechanism with 3 or more context sources, regardless of their context updates size. Database performance was identified as a major bottleneck during aggregation, hence we used in-memory tables & prepared statements, leading to up to 57% database time improvement, resulting in a reduction of the aggregation time by up to 34%. With this reduction and an increase in context size, we pushed the aggregation payoff threshold closer to 2 context sources.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1145/1880153.1880159
Computer Communication Review
Keywords
Field
DocType
context distribution mechanism,context type,context distribution,simple,rls,context change,context size,context updates,aggregation,sip-based context distribution,context source,context information,current context information,xcap,context sharing,computer and information science
Bottleneck,Database tuning,Computer security,Computer science,Computer network,Information and Computer Science,Stochastic game
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
40
5
0146-4833
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
10
Authors
1
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Alisa Devlic1959.46