Policy driven context-aware services in mobile environments

The emergence of ubiquitous computing, enabled by the availability of portable devices and advances in (wireless) networking technologies , has increased the need for personalized and adaptive services in mobile environments. Making use of context is essential to cope and timely react to changes in such environments and hence achieve adaptability, reliability, and seamless service provisioning. This paper introduces the use of policies in processing and disseminating contextual information to provide context aware mobile services. The policy-based approach facilitates end-users services context awareness by dynamically creating new context policies and by triggering actions of predefined policies in response to satisfied context sensitive conditions. The enforcement of policies on services automatically results in the adaptation of their behavior according to context changes. This approach has been demonstrated with presence and proximity services scenario using agent technology.