Information Dissemination between Mobile Nodes for Collaborative Context Awareness

In our everyday life, we frequently experience cases where persons group together. In those cases, context-aware systems capture and process identical context. Therefore, the need to collaboratively address Context Awareness (CA) emerges. In the considered setting, ad hoc networking between mobile nodes enables the exchange of information, thus, CA is facilitated. The synergy between mobile nodes materializes the Collaborative CA (CCA) paradigm. We advance the general CCA concept by performing communication between nodes probabilistically in a way similar to virus (epidemic) spreading. Nodes feature a hierarchical information model, which can be exploited by an information diffusion process. Multiple pieces of information, exchanged as epidemics, can complete the information present at a certain node, which in turn infers and spreads new information. We study this novel scheme extensively through an information model for context and an analytical framework (Markov process) with simulations. Our findings show that the information spreading large benefits from the mobility of nodes and semantic processing of the information model.