An architecture for providing environmental context data for context-aware mobile applications.

Context-aware applications may be developed for several kinds of computational platforms, ranging from more traditional computers to mobile devices.

However, its relevance becomes more noticeable on dynamic environments which have more frequent data changes, such as, applications executed on smartphones.

Developing mechanisms for obtaining, storing, managing, distributing and sharing context data present on the environment is a task that demands additional effort, as it adds extra logics and control structures (which are not part of the application domain), therefore increasing the development complexity, its schedule and its maintenance cost.

This research presents one architecture for providing context data specifically developed taking into account the several limitations inherent to smartphones, such as, low processing capacity, limited memory, unstable network connectivity, low duration batteries, amongst others. Throughout this work, a prototype for a context-aware application was developed in order to illustrate the use of this type of context provider, its mechanism, components, functionalities and services, which were designed with the objective of helping the development of such kind of applications.

Keywords: Context-aware; Software architecture; Mobile applications; Context