Today's mobile devices represent exceptional
foundations for wide-area Internet of Things (loT) applications.
However, the vast heterogeneity of real-world environments makes
it challenging for applications to sense, understand and adapt to the
user's continually evolving context. We're investigating a new
community-based approach for context-aware computing, where
advanced context sensing capabilities are dynamically deployed to
mobile devices as plug-ins, and are made available to applications
through only a few lines of code. Towards this end, we're
developing Dynamix, an open plug-and-play context framework for
Android. Dynamix runs as lightweight background service on the
user's mobile device, modeling context information from the
environment using the device itself as a sensing, processing and
communications platform. Mobile applications request context
support from Dynamix using simple application programming
interfaces (A PIs). Dynamix automatically discovers, downloads and
installs the plug-ins needed for a given context sensing task. When
the user changes environments, new or updated plug-ins can be
deployed to the device at runtime, without the need to restart the
application or framework. Dynamix comes with a growing
collection of ready-made plug-ins, and provides open software
developments kits (SDKs) and a scalable repository architecture,
which enable 3rd party developers to quickly create and share new
plug-ins types with the community. This paper presents the
Dynamix approach, describes our prototype implementation and
presents promising performance evaluation results.