Policy Based Control of Context Aware Pervasive Services

Abstract

While mobile computing technology is becoming more and more mature, the demand of having context sensing ability on any mobile or embedded systems is increasing rapidly. Context awareness is important if we want to give a mobile user autonomous, responsive and attentive services depending on his/her current contexts. To date, much research work have been developed to address some issues regarding location modeling, system design and implementation of simple awareness scenarios. A simple awareness system displays a set of useful services to the mobile user based on the primitive context information (i.e., a user’s location). It does not take into account a rule or policy that specifies when and where the user wants the particular service to be executed. Designing a context aware pervasive system with additional policy information is a new research challenge that needs to be addressed. This paper introduces the idea of using a policy mechanism to control context-aware behaviour for pervasive services. The paper also discusses the usefulness, design architecture and prototype implementation of the Mobile Hanging Services framework that supports proactive and ad hoc awareness services in pervasive environments. An approach for contextual services that uses a set of rules or policies to govern the service execution is illustrated through a sample Mobile Windows Media Player application.