Collaborative Context-Awareness and Reasoning for Optimised Service Delivery

This paper illustrates an infrastructure based system designed to collect and interpret contextual information in ubiquitous networking environments. Its aim is to support optimised delivery of end-user telecommunication services as well as provide to network self-management functions enriched information about users´ perspective on the network performance they get for the services and applications they use. To achieve these aims we exploit collaborative context-awareness amongst end-users and their devices. Per-user and per-network aggregation of contextual information allow the representation of respectively the users´ telecommunication environment and the networks´ performance status. The paper also contributes a novel decision making algorithm to deliver telecommunication services that match in the best possible way end-user´s requirements to current environment resources in terms of e.g. available networks and devices. The resulting model, based on fuzzy logic principles, makes the best service delivery decision given a set of network/device selection criteria and accounts also for relative importance amongst those criteria as well as for the quality of context information.