Context-aware information services provision for IoT environments

Abstract

The computing paradigm called Internet of Things (IoT) will connect billions of devices deployed around the world together in a near future. In the last years, IoT is gaining more attention. This paradigm has become popular by embedding mobile network and processing power into a wide range of physical computing devices used in everyday life of many people. An important element of the IoT is a middleware, which is a system able to abstract the management of physical devices and to provide services based on the information from these devices. The services provided are used by application clients to perform queries and obtain environmental information. In this way, it is already a subject in literature studies that address middleware systems not only interoperability of devices, but also context awareness feature. Context-aware is an important feature of IoT systems. This feature makes easy to discover, understand, and store relevant information related to devices. This information can be used for a refined provision of services based on the environment context and also for decision making. This work aims to present the Context-Aware System (CONASYS), that is a system to provide services of contextualized information about IoT devices in heterogeneous environments. The system is attached to COMPaaS IoT middleware and is able to act accordingly to the environment that it is inserted. We present in details the architecture of CONASYS, the technical issues related to the implementation of the system and perform some tests based in a real-world scenario. We also present some related work. Our objective is to provide a well-defined range of contextualized services that meet the users needs without specific knowledge of the environment, improving users Quality of Experience (QoE).