A Peer-Based Approach to Privacy-Preserving Context Management

Providing adequate support for context acquisition and management is a non-trivial task that complicates application development. To mitigate this, existing middleware systems rely on a centralized context service that manages the context of all devices located within a certain area. However, in many cases, centralized context management impacts privacy as it requires users to share their context with a possibly untrusted device. In this paper, we show how this problem can be avoided by a peer-based approach to context management. To validate the approach, we have implemented it on top of the BASE middleware and used it extensively in the PECES European research project. The evaluation shows that given a customizable implementation, the approach provides high flexibility while being suitable for a broad spectrum of devices.