ContextWare Architecture for Ambient Networks

This paper summarizes and expands the ContextWare architecture proposed for context dissemination and aggregation for Ambient Networks European research project. ContextWare deals with sources of context, the way of acquiring context data from sensors, and its distribution to interested context consumers in an uniform form. Components of ContextWare architecture are described in details. Paper specifies Context Source, which is an abstraction of context provider, Context Manager, which handles high-level context aggregation and processing, Context Coordinator, which is used for handling large set of dynamic Context Sources, and Triggering, which assures context consistency. The collaboration of these components is illustrated with a scenario, which presents usage of ContextWare architecture within AN application. The system was successfully used in the Ambient Networks Project.