Architectural Support for Mobile Context-Aware Applications

Abstract

Context-awareness has emerged as an important and desirable feature in distributed mobile systems, since it benefits from the changes in the user’s context to dynamically tailor services to the user’s current situation and needs. This chapter presents our efforts on designing a flexible infrastructure to support the development of mobile context-aware applications. We discuss relevant context-awareness concepts, define architectural patterns on context-awareness and present the design of the target infrastructure. Our approach towards this infrastructure includes the definition of a service-oriented architecture in which the dynamic customization of services is specified by means of description rules at infrastructure runtime.