2-6

Pervasive Communications Handbook

Some of the key challenges in modeling context are summarized as follows [3,8]:

1. User (internal) contexts may be incorrectly, incompletely, imprecisely determined, or predicted. This may be due to the fact that the user may have provided
faulty information when explicitly asked, or the user contexts are modeled from
too little data over too small time period.
2. Environmental (external) contexts may also be incorrectly, incompletely, imprecisely determined, or predicted. This could be due to delays that can occur in
exchanging dynamic information, or path between external context producer and
the consumer is disconnected temporarily or permanently.
3. Some contexts may exhibit a range of spatial and/or temporal characteristics; that
is, the information generated may change quickly over time and distance.
4. Some contexts may be using different format and may have alternative
representations.
5. Some contexts may be distributed and composed of multiple parts that are highly
interrelated. They may be related by rules that make a context dependent on other
context. These composite contexts may need to be partially validated as all their
parts cannot be always accessed.
6. In general, context-awareness generates a huge volume of data due to large statespace of environment to be studied, and many sensors are used.
7. Context use can reduce the security and privacy of users.
8. The awareness, availability, and change of context signals may overload users and
distract them from performing their on-going interaction with the application.

A robust context-aware application must ensure that there are reasonable solutions to
above-mentioned problems. For example, in order to solve a huge-volume data-generation problem (as mentioned in item 6), we can filter raw context information before
storing data. Moreover, some data mining schemes can be used to analyze and filter the
raw data.

2.3 Testing Challenges

Context-aware pervasive systems raise several software testing challenges. The middleware architecture of context-aware application, as shown in Figure 2.2, gives rise to four
different views of the context: physical, sensed, inferred, and presumed context [5]. It is
quite possible that all four views may differ from each other at any given point in time
during the execution of application. It is possible that faults may exist in either context
sensors, context manager, the adaptation rule, or in the application logic. However, complex faults may arise due to inconsistencies among various views of the context.
Testing context-aware applications, especially testing for adaptation faults in the
applications, are quite challenging due to factors mentioned in the previous section
about context modeling and the followings [5,9]:

1. There are several representations of contexts along with different formats used.
2. The context variables are updated asynchronously at different rates by the middleware, causing transient inconsistencies between external physical context value and