Towards context-awareness in ubiquitous computing

Future ubiquitous computing has accelerated the need of context-awareness that leverages information about surrounding situation so as to adapt applications. There is considerable interest in context-awareness, and many prototypes have been proposed, which have demonstrated the potential of context-aware applications. That notwithstanding, these kinds of systems are known to be difficult to design, develop and maintain. This paper considers these difficulties as it discusses the core issues of context-aware computing, including definition of context, techniques of acquiring, modeling and adapting to contextual information. It intends to provide the community with a comprehensive and detailed view of current state of the art.