Location-based and content-based information access in mobile peer-to-peer computing: The TOTA approach

Mobile peer-to-peer computing calls for suitable middleware and programming models to provide dynamic access to information and resources in dynamic network environments. In particular, location-based access and content-based access to information appear two very useful mechanisms. Here we present how both these two kinds of information access can be realized via TOTA (Tuples On The Air), a novel middleware that relies on spatially distributed tuples for supporting uncoupled and adaptive interactions between application agents. The TOTA middleware takes care of both propagating tuples across a network on the basis of application-specific rules and of adaptively re-shaping the resulting distributed structures accordingly to changes in the network structures. In particular, the effectiveness of our model will be tested in providing means for both location-based and content-based access to information.