Towards a cloud-based framework for context management

With the advances in sensing technology and the proliferation of mobile devices and applications, provisioning of context information has been a particularly common research topic. Many research works have proposed, designed, and implemented frameworks and middleware infrastructures for context management. High-level context information is typically acquired from context services that aggregate raw context information sensed by sensors and mobile devices. Given the massive amount of context data processed and stored by context services and the widespread penetration of cloud computing technology in the industry, context providers now can leverage their services by deploying them on the cloud. In this paper, we describe a novel framework for context management that relies on cloud-based context services. One of the benefits of the approach is that context providers can scale up and down depending on current demand for context information.