Feasibility evaluation of context distribution in mobile environment

Although mobile devices are rich sources of context information, the distribution of context in mobile environments is often hindered by the limited battery life, and wireless connections with low bandwidth. In this paper, we present two different implementations that enable context distribution in mobile environments. The first solution relies on a presence service architecture and publish-subscribe messaging, whereas the second solution is based on a mobile Web server architecture where the context information is fetched from the mobile device when needed. This paper evaluates the feasibility of the two implementations in mobile context distribution. The testing results show that the mobile server-based solution sets higher demands for the mobile device capabilities, but is able to provide more up-to-date context information. However, the solution based on the centralized context service provides higher interoperability as it utilizes the existing IETF standards.