Enabling context-awareness from network-level location tracking

Abstract

The development of mobile computing combined with the exponential growth of the Internet makes it possible to access informations and services from everywhere. However, user's mobility also means that the context in which the information system is used change dramatically. To be useful in these new environments, applications will have to be adaptive, which requires context-awareness. We propose in this paper an efficient way to export context-dependent informations to applications by exploiting location knowledge available at the network level. This method is illustrated by a prototype using Mobile-IP and a context-aware Web browser.