Context-aware service utilisation in the clouds and energy conservation

Ubiquitous computing environments are characterised by smart, interconnected artefacts embedded in our physical world that provide useful services to human inhabitants unobtrusively. Mobile devices are becoming the primary tools for human interaction with these embedded artefacts and for the utilisation of services available in smart computing environments such as clouds. Advancements in the capabilities of mobile devices allow a number of user and environment related context consumers to be hosted on these devices. Without a coordinating component, these context consumers and providers are a potential burden on device resources; specifically the effect of uncoordinated computation and communication with cloud-enabled services can negatively impact battery life. Therefore energy conservation is a major concern in realising the collaboration and utilisation of mobile device based context-aware applications and cloud based services. This paper presents the concept of a context-brokering component to aid in coordination and communication of context information between mobile devices and services deployed in a cloud infrastructure. A prototype context broker is experimentally analysed for effects on energy conservation when accessing and coordinating with cloud services on a smart device, with results signifying reduction in energy consumption.