Towards World Wide Context Management: Architecting Distributed Contextual Intelligence Systems for Real-Time IoT Applications

Context-awareness is becoming more relevant for smarter modern-day applications. With billions of IoT devices able to monitor a plethora of parameters in near real-time, inferring contextual information at scale while maintaining adequate Quality of Context and delivering in time has been non-trivial for state-of-the-art centralized Context Management Systems. Further, handling complex situations and entity relations based on local awareness are areas that still need investigation. In this paper, we propose a novel edge-computing based architecture for distributed contextual intelligence systems that could address these research problems. First, we critically evaluate the current state-of-the-art in context-awareness and establish the necessity of a distributed architecture. Then, our proposed architecture is introduced along with the protocols and algorithms accompanied by real-world examples. The paper also highlights the future direction for research work in the area.