Supporting the Development of Network-Aware Reactive Applications on Smartphones

In the last years, research about context-aware systems has been particularly intense. Nevertheless, most of the proposed approaches and systems failed to flow from research to industry. In this paper we propose ANARC, a library that eases the development of network-aware applications for smartphones. ANARC does not try to cope with all the possible meanings and variations of context, it instead focuses on a specific restriction: the network and associated properties. ANARC adopts a rule- and trigger-based approach: when the network context matches the one described in a rule, the corresponding notification is sent to the application level. Examples of use of the proposed library -- for mapping network coverage, detecting roaming regions of mobile operators, and monitoring WiFi access points -- are included to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach.