Improving level of service for mobile users using context-awareness

The development of mobile computing combined, with the exponential growth of the Internet leads to new challenges in the development of large-scale information systems. As they move, users may experience dramatic variations in their environment, in terms of latency, network bandwidth, available services around etc. As a consequence, the level of service of the provided information may strongly depend on the context from which a user issues a query. To handle such variations while providing the best level of service to a user, information systems must be adaptive to change their behavior, preferably without the user intervention, depending on the current context of the user. We propose a general infrastructure based on contextual objects to design and develop adaptive distributed information systems in order to keep, even to improve, the level of the delivered service despite environment variations. As a first step to a complete implementation of our framework, we have implemented a location-aware Web service based on mobile-IP