A mobile context monitoring platform for pervasive computing environments

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new mobile platform to support emerging pervasive applications in a Personal Area Network (PAN)-scale dynamic mobile computing environment. The PAN-scale computing environment will constitute an important part of future pervasive-space technology with highly proactive applications, requiring continuous monitoring of users' contexts. The context-aware applications impose heavy workloads on the mobile device and the sensor nodes with highly limited computing and battery power especially for continuous monitoring of user contexts. Our new context monitoring system provides a scalable and energy-efficient monitoring architecture for such applications. It actively interplays between applications and computing resources, coordinating multiple applications to effectively leverage the limited resources and provide quality service to users. Example applications are also developed based on the implemented system design. Experimental results show that the system achieves a superior level of scalability and energy efficiency.