Active Architecture for Pervasive Contextual Services

Pervasive services may be defined as services that are available to any client (anytime, anywhere). Here we focus on the software and network infrastructure required to support pervasive contextual services operating over a wide area. One of the key requirements is a matching service capable of assimilating and filtering information from various sources and determining matches relevant to those services. We consider some of the challenges in engineering a globally distributed matching service that is scalable, manageable, and able to evolve incrementally as usage pat-terns, data formats, services, network topologies and deployment technologies change. We outline an approach based on the use of a peer-to-peer architecture to distribute user events and data, and to support the deployment and evolution of the infrastructure itself.