A Micro-Economic Approach to Conflict Resolution in Mobile Computing

Licia Capra, Wolfgang Emmerich and Cecilia Mascolo

Dept. of Computer Science,
University College London
Dept. of Computer Science
Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT UK

Abstract:
Mobile devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants, have gained wide-spread popularity. These devices will increasingly be networked, thus enabling the construction of distributed applications that have to adapt to changes in context, such as variations in network bandwidth, exhaustion of battery power or reachability of services on other devices. We sho w how the construction of adaptive and context-aware mobile applications can be suppor ted using a reflective middleware. The middleware provides software engineers with primitives to describe how context changes are handled using policies. These policies may conflict. In this paper, we classify the diff erent types of conflicts that may arise in mobile computing. We argue that conflicts c annot be resolved statically at the time applications are designed, but, rather, need to be resolved at execution time. We demonstrate a method by which these policy conflicts can b e treated. This method uses a micro-economic approach that relies on a particular type of s ealed-bid auction.


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Updated on: 25/05/2002
Wolfgang Emmerich