Tackling Network Challenges in Context Aware Environments: Lightweight Context Management Architecture

Resilience in context-aware applications is especially important within challenged network and physical environments. This paper discusses the current methods for maintaining resilience in context management architectures. These methods largely focus on resolving contextual information loss, rather than maintaining the standard operation of the deployed system. The paper contends that this approach leads to loss of functionality and unwanted modifications to contextual information. Existing approaches for mitigating the effects of network instability have a high resource requirement and do not maintain the standard functionality of the system in real time. The paper proposes and discusses the Lightweight Context Management Architecture (LCMA) which addresses the lack of lightweight solutions for resilient context management systems. The functional requirements of the LCMA components are proposed and detailed. The proposed LCMA will be validated in mission-critical applications with potential adversarial actions.