Context Awareness as a Service for Cloud Resource Optimization

Cloud computing architectures involve different actors that can be divided into four categories: infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service providers, PaaS clients, and end users. These actors establish contracts with each other, with the intention of optimizing their costs and offering quality service. Paying attention to end users´ context and providing context awareness as a service at the PaaS provider level offers several benefits, including that it lets PaaS clients develop multimodal services and thus optimize infrastructure use. In this article, the authors describe how to include context awareness in cloud infrastructure and the impact it could have at each actor´s level.