Mobile phone-to-phone personal context sharing

Abstract

Sharing personal context information using mobile phone is receiving considerable attentions in ubiquitous computing applications. The most common architecture for sharing personal context information via mobile phone uses centralized server. Such server-based architecture, however, cannot avoid waste of mobile phone's limited resources for sharing personal context information. Additionally, dynamic privacy control of the shared context information according to user's various situations is very difficult in the server-based architecture. The increased computation power of mobile phone enables us to create system architecture that can share personal context information between two mobile phones directly. In this paper, we describe design of system architecture for lightweight interactive mobile phone-to-phone personal context sharing system that uses SMS (Short Message Services) as a basic communication method, and introduce application prototypes that are developed based on the proposed architecture. Compared to centralized server-based architecture, the proposed one can minimize waste of limited mobile phone resources and maximizes dynamic privacy control in sharing personal context information.