Feasibility of floating content service for context aware applications

Abstract

Context aware applications encompass an ever-expanding set of applications that make use of a combination of restricted spatio-temporal locality and mobile communications to deliver a variety of services to the user. The communication requirements for such applications significantly differ from ordinary applications and opportunistic communications can play a role for such applications because they naturally incorporate context.

In this work we chose to analyze the complex interplay between context information, communication technologies, and context aware applications, by studying the feasibility of a context aware communication service called floating content as a support for context aware mobile applications. In order to complement our performance study, we considered a specific context aware application belonging to family of ”social proximity sensing” which can be implemented via floating content.

We analyzed the suitability of the floating content technique for such an application, and analyzed the main performance bounds at the communication level by means of simulations. The analysis revealed that floating content service can be used only for the applications that are used in areas having high user density.