Contextware Research Challenges in Ambient Networks

Abstract

Network-centric context information is used to make networks more receptive to the users’ needs by personalizing the communication process and making it more sensitive to changes that may occur in the surroundings. As such, it is a natural step that context awareness should be suitably incorporated within traditional networks in order to create an ‘ambient network’. This approach is aimed at enabling the co-operation of heterogeneous networks on demand, transparently to the potential users, and without the need for preconfiguration or offline negotiation between network operators. This paper discusses the approach taken by authors to incorporate context-awareness into ambient networking concepts. It discusses how network-related context information should be utilized in ambient networks for the end user to fully experience the pervasiveness of a network and the research challenges arising from this utilization. The paper also evaluates the benefits of employing context information and contextware concepts in ambient networks.KeywordsContext InformationContext DataContext ControlContext ProviderContext SourceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.