A survey on context-aware systems

TLDR

Context‑aware systems gather context data and adapt behavior, especially on mobile devices, to greatly enhance usability. The paper presents common architecture principles and a layered design framework for context‑aware systems. The authors introduce existing context‑aware middleware and frameworks, discuss various approaches, and analyze key aspects of context‑aware computing.

Abstract

Context-aware systems offer entirely new opportunities for application developers and for end users by gathering context data and adapting systems behaviour accordingly. Especially in combination with mobile devices, these mechanisms are of high value and are used to increase usability tremendously. In this paper, we present common architecture principles of context-aware systems and derive a layered conceptual design framework to explain the different elements common to most context-aware architectures. Based on these design principles, we introduce various existing context-aware systems focusing on context-aware middleware and frameworks, which ease the development of context-aware applications. We discuss various approaches and analyse important aspects in context-aware computing on the basis of the presented systems.