Using quality of context to resolve conflicts in context-aware systems

ABSTRACT

Context-aware systems in mobile and pervasive environments face many conflicting situations while collecting sensor data, processing sensor data to extract consistent and coherent high level context information, and disseminating that context information to assist in making decisions to adapt to the continuously evolving situations without diverting human attention. These conflicting situations pose stern challenges to the design and development of context-aware systems by making it extremely complicated and error-prone. Quality of Context parameters can be used to cope with these challenges. In this paper, we discuss the conflicting situations that a context-aware system may face at different layers of its conceptual design and present the conflict resolving policies that are defined on the basis of the Quality of Context parameters. We also illustrate how these policies can be used in different conflicting situations to improve the performance and effectiveness of context-aware systems.

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