An optimization of context sharing for self-adaptive mobile applications

Abstract

Because of the high potential of mobile and pervasive computing systems, there is an ongoing trend in developing applications exhibiting context awareness and adaptive behavior. While context awareness guarantees that the applications are aware of both their context and their own state, dynamic adaptivity enables them to react on their knowledge about it and optimize their offered services. However, because in pervasive computing environments there is also a need for enabling arbitrary synergies, such a behavior also requires appropriate algorithms implementing the adaptation logic required to reason on the sensed context and dynamically decide on the most appropriate adaptations. This paper discusses how utility function-based approaches can use context-awareness for that and, additionally, it shows how the decision-making process is improved with respect to both performance and resource consumption by using a more intelligent approach. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.