Network

You have to call a friend at 17.00; so you set your alarm on your mobile phone, to remind you at 17.00. There’s nothing special with that. But imagine another scenario. You want your mobile to remind you to call your mum when you are home. You want your mobile phone to remind you to pay something to Anita when you meet her. And why is it impossible? With GPS or BTS locator, our mobile phones know where we are, anytime.

Those necessities, among others, are the motivation to develop context awareness. Strictly speaking, context awareness refers to the capability of a system to be sensitive and react to user and network-environment variations and thus assist the dynamic adaptation to those changes. But context information is complex and heterogeneous as the services that it intends to support. Therefore handling and distributing context efficiently for enhancing wireless systems and multimedia services is one of the main problems being faced in the mobile applications.

Even though, some researches has been starting on this area. It could start with simple things, like automatic insertion of user’s location into searches. When you google for Starbucks location, you would find different results (address, phone number, etc), depends on your location, without having to type your location.

For the next step, context awareness will use other relevant information: user’s profile, hence his/her lifestyle, communications history, friends and other relations, and anything imaginable. Compiling those information with several artificial intelligence methods will enhance the services. A Context Information Dissemination System (CIDS) must be implemented. CIDS aims to achieve efficient collection and dissemination of context information from devices spread and distributed in ad hoc networks. It provides context information to overlay applications, in a specific and formal object-oriented context information model, that helps the management and provisioning of new context-aware services or even the modification of the functionality of applications or services in operation.

As discussed everywhere, Mobile 2.0 is mentioned as a successor to Web 2.0. Mobile 2.0 is obviously not only a scheme to use Web 2.0 with your mobile phone. Mobile 2.0 extending Web 2.0’s capabilities to mobile devices while coping with their limitations (low computing power, short battery lifetime, small display, etc) and leveraging the opportunities of location-based computing. Context awareness, I believe, would be one of the enablers for Mobile 2.0. Pervasive and context-aware support infrastructure will create new business opportunities.