A Protocol for Supporting Context Provision in Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The increasing ubiquity of mobile computing devices has made ad hoc networks everyday occurrences. In these highly dynamic environments, the multitude of devices provides a varied and rapidly changing environment in which applications must learn to operate. Successful end-user applications will not only learn to function in this environment but will take advantage of the variety of information available. Protocols for gathering an application’s contextual information must be built into the network to function in a timely and adaptive fashion. This paper presents a protocol for providing context information to such applications. We present an implementation and show how it provides context information to mobile applications in an on-demand manner. We also provide a simulation analysis of the tradeoffs between consistency and range of context definitions in highly dynamic ad hoc networks