Towards context consistency by concurrent checking for Internetware applications  

作　　者：XU Chang LIU YePang CHEUNG S.C. CAO Chun LV Jian 

机构地区：[1]State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology,Nanjing University [2]Department of Computer Science and Technology,Nanjing University [3]Department of Computer Science and Engineering,The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

出　　处：《Science China(Information Sciences)》2013年第8期65-84,共20页中国科学（信息科学）（英文版）

基　　金：funded by National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) (Grant No.2009CB320702);National High-tech R&D Program (863 Program) (Grant No. 2012AA011205);National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61100038,61021062);Research Grants Council (612210) of HongKong;Chang Xu was also partially supported by Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University,China (Grant No. NCET-10-0486)

摘　　要：Internetware applications are emerging and being widely used. They can adapt their behavior based on environmental contexts and deliver smart services. These contexts can be subject to various noises, which cause them to be inaccurate, incomplete, or even to conflict with each other. This is known as context inconsistency problem. Context inconsistency can trigger unexpected behavior to applications, and therefore should be prevented. One promising approach is to check contexts against consistency constraints so as to detect the occurrences of context inconsistency at runtime. Existing techniques have attempted different ways to improve the checking efficiency or effectiveness with different trade-offs in space overhead or communication cost. However, none of them has exploited multi-core computing capability to systematically improve the checking efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel concurrent checking technique Con-C to efficiently detect inconsistencies in huge volumes of dynamic contexts. Con-C derives checking subtasks for each consistency constraint based on its structure and semantics. It achieves this in a fully automated way, and at the same time can guarantee its derived checking subtasks to be persistently balanced. We evaluated Con-C by controlled experiments through a large-scale real-world application. It reported promising results that Con-C improved the checking efficiency by extra 57.0%, in addition to what had been gained by incremental checking.Internetware applications are emerging and being widely used. They can adapt their behavior based on environmental contexts and deliver smart services. These contexts can be subject to various noises, which cause them to be inaccurate, incomplete, or even to conflict with each other. This is known as context inconsistency problem. Context inconsistency can trigger unexpected behavior to applications, and therefore should be prevented. One promising approach is to check contexts against consistency constraints so as to detect the occurrences of context inconsistency at runtime. Existing techniques have attempted different ways to improve the checking efficiency or effectiveness with different trade-offs in space overhead or communication cost. However, none of them has exploited multi-core computing capability to systematically improve the checking efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel concurrent checking technique Con-C to efficiently detect inconsistencies in huge volumes of dynamic contexts. Con-C derives checking subtasks for each consistency constraint based on its structure and semantics. It achieves this in a fully automated way, and at the same time can guarantee its derived checking subtasks to be persistently balanced. We evaluated Con-C by controlled experiments through a large-scale real-world application. It reported promising results that Con-C improved the checking efficiency by extra 57.0%, in addition to what had been gained by incremental checking.

关 键 词：concurrent checking consistency constraint context inconsistency pervasive computing Internet-ware 

分 类 号：TP393.09[自动化与计算机技术—计算机应用技术]