Ubiquitous mobile awareness from sensor networks

Abstract

Users require applications and services to be available everywhere, enabling them to focus on what is important to them. Therefore, context information (e.g., spatial data, user preferences, available connectivity and devices, etc.) has to be accessible to applications that run in end systems close to users. In response to this, we present a novel architecture for ubiquitous sensing and sharing of context in mobile services and applications. The architecture offers distributed storage of context derived from sensor networks wirelessly attached to mobile phones and other devices. The architecture also handles frequent updates of sensor information and is interoperable with presence in 3G mobile systems, thus enabling ubiquitous sensing applications. We demonstrate these concepts and the principle operation in a sample ubiquitous Mobile Awareness service. © ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2009.