Context data distribution with quality guarantees for Android-based mobile systems

In the last years, context awareness, namely the provisioning of the current execution context to the application level, has received an increasing attention up to becoming a core capability in next generation mobile scenarios. Context awareness intrinsically forces a continuous delivery of context data to resource-constrained mobile devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants, to allow application adaptation, and that can become too severe a constraint even for modern platforms (Android, iOS, etc.). This paper focuses on the realization of a context data distribution support for Android-based mobile phones with guaranteed quality levels on the context data delivery time. Android, notwithstanding its great potential, puts harsh constraints on the implementation of specific context distribution primitives, thus preventing the realization of a wide set of significant deployment scenarios. At this stage, we face that a large campaign of tests are necessary. We have collected main experimental results in a real testbed to highlight noteworthy details on the runtime performance obtainable with a real Android deployment.