Quality of Context and Mobile Systems

Abstract

Mobile and pervasive environments are characterized by a plethora of handheld computation and communication enabled devices working as a smart assistant for users by collecting context from the environment and adapting to dynamically changing situation in the environment. Their capabilities are heavily affected by the quality of context information that has been considered unsatisfactory since the start of research in context-aware systems. Early context-aware systems have also tried to collect extra information that can make the applications aware of the quality of context information. Subsequently term Quality of Context (QoC) is coined to indicate quality of context information. In this chapter, the authors present an overview of research efforts undertaken to realize QoC parameters. They also present a summary of works that have used QoC parameters to optimize the performance of different tasks in context-aware systems. Finally, the chapter discusses future directions of QoC research efforts.