ACAN - Ad hoc Context Aware Network

This paper presents the design and system architecture of the Ad hoc Context Aware Network (ACAN), a wireless environment with no pre-configuration and with spontaneous applications running according to the contextual situation. The ACAN is a new vision to the future of the wireless networks where it will consist of sensors that will capture the entities in the environment and the surrounding users. A context manager agent will interpret the sensor captures information and process it to a higher level context data to be used by the Ad hoc application in a way to minimize the user attention while maximizing the relevance of the information provided. ACAN targets the network layer and the application layer and introduces new mechanisms for network configuration, QoS provisioning and more dynamic adaptable and flexible applications. We explain the architectural model of the ACAN with the required goals and specification, the ACAN new protocol stack is presented and the Context Aware Service Discovery Protocol (CASDP) with its advantages over the existing service discovery protocols.