Ubiquitous Mobile Awareness from Sensor Networks

Users require applications and services to be available everywhere, enabling users to focus on what is important to them. Therefore, context information from users (e.g., spatial data, preferences, available connectivity and devices, etc.) needs to be accessible to systems that deliver services via a heterogeneous infrastructure. We present a novel approach to support ubiquitous sensing and availability of context to services and applications. This approach offers a scalable, distributed storage of context derived from sensor networks wirelessly attached to mobile phones and other devices. The support handles frequent updates of sensor information and is interoperable with presence services in 3G mobile systems, thus enabling ubiquitous sensing applications. We demonstrate these concepts and the principle operation in a sample ubiquitous mobile awareness service. The importance of this contribution, in comparison to earlier work, lies in the availability of real-time ubiquitous sensing to both applications on the Internet as well as applications in mobile systems.