Concepts and architectures for mobile context-aware applications

Context-awareness has been investigated for almost a decade and is considered as a convenient and desirable feature in distributed mobile systems since it allows these systems to benefit from the changes in their users’ context to dynamically tailor services to their users’ current situation and needs. This chapter addresses the research results and challenges of 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, present the design of a target infrastructure, and discuss some related research and research trends. The context-aware infrastructure described in this chapter follows the principles of service-oriented architectures in which the dynamic customization of context-aware mobile services is specified by means of application behavior rules that are interpreted and applied by the infrastructure at runtime