Global and Thread-Local Activation of Contextual Program Execution Environments

Ubiquitous computing often demands applications to be both customizable and context-aware: Users expect smart devices to adapt to the context and respect their preferences. Currently, these features are not well-supported in a multi-core embedded setup. The aim of this paper is to describe a tool that supports both thread-local and global context-awareness. The tool is based on code generation using a simple specification language and a library that persists the customizations. In a case study and benchmark we evaluate a web server application on embedded hardware. Our web server application uses contexts to represent user sessions, language settings, and sensor states. The results show that the tool has minimal overhead, is well-suited for ubiquitous computing, and takes full advantage of multi-core processors.