Enabling Context-Aware Computing for the Nomadic Mobile User: A Service Oriented and Quality Driven Approach

Context-awareness (CA) enables the development of personalized applications for highly mobile and demanding users in the pervasive environments. These applications rely on the components responsible for context sensing, processing, storage and inference. Various context-aware computing infrastructures exist to shield the application developers from the complexity of developing these components. However, some additional concerns including the distribution of context sources in the pervasive environments, quality of context (QoC) and user privacy demand that a context-aware computing infrastructure should also handle these aspects. This paper introduces our work in progress on the context distribution framework (CDF) aimed at providing a service oriented infrastructure for the context-aware applications hosted on a mobile device. In the current version of CDF, we focus on three aspects: a) transparent off-loading of resource intensive context manipulation from the mobile device; b) selection of the suitable context sources based on the quality of context (QoC); and c) modeling mobile context sources as services.