An SoC-based context-aware system architecture

Context-aware computing has been attracting the attention as an approach to alleviating the inconvenience in human-computer interactions. This paper proposes a context-aware system architecture to be implemented on an SoC (System-on-a-Chip). The proposed architecture supports sensor abstraction, notification mechanism for context changes, modular development, easy service composition using if-then rules, and flexible context-aware service implementation. It consists of the communication unit, the processing unit, the blackboard, and the rule-based system unit, where the first three components reside in the microprocessor part of the SoC and the rule-based system unit is implemented in hardware. For the proposed architecture, an SoC system has been designed and tested in an SoC development platform called SystemC. This SoC-based context-aware system architecture has been developed to apply to mobile intelligent robots which would assist old people at home in a context-aware manner.