Towards efficient support of context - awareness in mobile systems

Future mobile communication systems beyond 3rd generation (3G) are expected to signal the transition from inflexible, vertical infrastructures to reconfigurable, horizontally integrated networks that incorporates a vast, ubiquitous space of devices and radio technologies and will be able to deliver to end-users a previously unimaginable range of valuable services. A fundamental characteristic for systems and services that operate in such a pervasive, heterogeneous environment is context-awareness that enables dynamic adaptation according to rapidly changing situational parameters. Challenging technical issues, however, need to be solved on the route to realization of this feature, including the optimal representation, placement, replication and management of the corresponding context information. This paper discusses some of these problems and introduces data management schemes that facilitate the seamless incorporation of re-usable situation-awareness functionality into a middleware platform for beyond 3G service delivery and management.