Context Management systems applied to mobility

Recent advances in electronic and automotive industries as well as in wireless telecommunication technologies have drawn a new picture where each vehicle became ¿fully networked¿. The most viable solutions rely on the NEMO (NEtwork MObility) protocol. In this approaches, a new device, the Mobile Router (MR), will take place in vehicles. It has to manage mobility and take advantages of the surrounding wireless technology diversity to offer IP connectivity to on-board devices. To be efficient, the MR has to take into account various contextual parameters regarding the management of wireless network interfaces and the routing of the flows. These parameters are many-fold. They could be technical, depend on the environment of the MR or on the applications requirements. Exchanging such a contextual information can be achieved easily for simple system using basic polling and broadcasting. However, systems involving more than one MR and systems having hot sensor plugging capabilities will require a more advanced system for exchanging context information : A CMS (Context Management System). Several CMS are available in literature. They are used in many domains spanning from healthcare monitoring to home automation. The objective of this paper is to identify the CMS features that are significant in a mobility context and to compare the available CMSs based on these criteria.