A New Business Model and Architecture for Context-Aware Applications Provisioning in the Cloud

Context-aware applications are seen as one of the "killer" application categories of the future, due to their ability to offer personalized services by adapting their behavior according to the users\´ needs and changing situation. Context-aware applications rely in their operation on a complex set of functionalities (i.e. context-awareness substrates). In order to facilitate the development of novel context-aware applications and achieve efficiency in terms of resource utilization, there is a need for a unified, openly-accessible, scalable context management platform that enables the dynamic discovery, composition, and reuse of context-awareness substrates by various context-aware applications. The lack of such platform is a major impediment to the fast and resource efficient development of context aware applications. In this paper, we propose a novel virtualized context management platform in the cloud, in which a shared pool of virtualized context-awareness substrates can be offered by different providers, and leased on demand. Those substrates can be dynamically discovered and composed to enable fast and cost-effective development of a variety of context-aware applications. The proposed platform relies on a new business model which introduces the sensors substrate provider and the broker as new roles in the traditional cloud business model. A detailed software architecture and preliminary prototype implementation are also presented.