Abstract

In a dynamic heterogeneous environment, such as pervasive and ubiquitous computing, context-aware adaptation is a key concept to meet the varying requirements of different users. Context-awareness is the most promising way to manage the user information and to provide the means of communication at the right time in the right way. Connectivity and quality of service (QoS) of applications are two most important considerations that should be taken into account for designing a context-aware system. This paper presents connectivity from the view point of context awareness, identifies various relevant raw connectivity contexts, and discusses how high-level context information can be abstracted from the raw context information. It also presents a QoS-and context-aware algorithm for supporting mobile applications in a heterogeneous network environment. The unified approach towards connectivity information and QoS-awareness makes the algorithm more practical than most of the currently existing algorithms which consider connectivity and QoS separately. Simulation results show that the use of context information helps to improve the delivered application QoS.