Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions

The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions

A Context-aware and Intelligent Framework for the Secure Mission Critical Systems

Recent technological advancements in pervasive systems have shown the poten-tial to address challenges in the military domain. Research developments in mili-tary-based mission-critical systems have refined a lot as in autopilot, sensing true target behavior, battle damage conditions, acquiring and manipulating command control information. However, the application of pervasive systems in the military domain is still evolving. In this paper, an intelligent framework has been pro-posed for mission-critical systems to incorporate advanced heterogeneous com-munication protocols; service-oriented layered structure and context-aware infor-mation manipulation. The proposed framework addresses the limitation of “time-space” constraints in Mission-critical systems that have been improved signifi-cantly. This improvement is courtesy to enhancing situation-aware tactical capa-bilities such as localization, decision significance, strategic span, strategic inten-tions, resource coordination and profiling concerning the situation. A comprehen-sive use case model has been presented for a typical battle-field scenario followed by a comparison of the proposed framework with existing techniques. It is evi-dent from experiments and analyses that the proposed framework provides more effective and seamless interaction with contextual resources to improve tactical capabilities. This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: A Context-aware and Intelligent Framework for the Secure Mission Critical Systems, which has been published in final form in Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Version