A Scalable Framework for Provisioning Context-aware Application Services with High-quality Context Information

As a result of the growing use of mobile devices and the proliferation of wireless networks, mobile users areincreasingly requiring access to personalized application services when they move to new locations. Therefore,service providers should adapt their services to the context of the mobile user. The quality-of-contextinformation (QoC) is a determining factor in the adaptation process. Given that application services typicallyreceive context data from several context services, the selection of suitable context services is of utmostimportance in providing mobile users with tailored services. In this paper, we describe our proposed frameworkfor context management and an auction-based algorithm for the selection of context services on the basis of theQoC they can offer. The algorithm takes into account the QoC requirements of application services for eachcontext information to which they subscribe with the Context Broker, on which the framework is relying forcontext management. We also describe an analytical model for the assessment of the proposed model using theasymptotic bound analysis approach.