Energy efficient mobile middleware to support context monitoring for context-aware applications

Abstract

An emerging Personal Area Network (PAN) enables context-aware applications for a user. We present mCAM (mobile Context-Aware Middleware), an energy efficient mobile middleware to support context monitoring for context-aware applications. The context-aware applications need to continuously monitor the user context in order to offer the appropriate services. However this consumes the batteries of energy-limited sensors consisting of the PAN significantly. mCAM provides energy efficient context monitoring to the context-aware applications, which extends the battery lifetime of sensors and enables context-aware applications to provide long-running services. In this paper, we describe the key idea and the system design of mCAM to support energy efficient context monitoring in mobile environment. We demonstrate the energy efficiency of mCAM through an extensive simulation study. The simulation result shows that mCAM can extend the battery lifetime of sensors significantly, thereby providing long-running context-aware services to users.