Design of a middleware for compound context-awareness on sensor-based mobile environments

In this paper, we design a middleware for context-awareness which provides compound contexts from diverse sensors on a mobile device. Until now, most of context-aware application developers have taken responsibility for context processing from sensing data. Such application-level context processing causes heavily redundant data processing and leads to significant resource waste in energy as well as computing. In the proposed scheme, we define primitive and compound context map which consists of relavant sensors and features. Based on the context definition, each application demands a context of interest to the middleware, and thus similar context-aware applications inherently share context information and procesing within the middleware. We show that the proposed scheme significantly reduces the resource amounts of cpu, memory, and battery, and that the performance gain gets much more when multiple applications which need similar contexts are running.