Demonstrating Context-Aware Services in the MobilityFirst Future Internet Architecture

As the amount of mobile devices populating the Internet keeps growing at tremendous pace, context-aware services have gained a lot of traction thanks to the wide set of potential use cases they can be applied to. Environmental sensing applications, emergency services, and location-aware messaging are just a few examples of applications that are expected to increase in popularity in the next few years. The MobilityFirst future Internet architecture, a clean-slate Internet architecture design, provides the necessary abstractions for creating and managing context-aware services. Starting from these abstractions we design a context services framework, which is based on a set of three fundamental mechanisms: an easy way to specify context based on human understandable techniques, i.e. use of names; an architecture supported management mechanism that allows both to conveniently deploy the service and efficiently provide management capabilities; and a native delivery system that reduces the tax on the network components and on the overhead cost of deploying such applications. In this paper, we present an emergency alert system for vehicles assisting first responders that exploits users location awareness to support quick and reliable alert messages for interested vehicles. By deploying a demo of the system on a nationwide testbed, we aim to provide better understanding of the dynamics involved in our designed framework.