A bargaining approach for disseminating context information to context-aware services

The services landscape is changing with the growing acceptation of cloud computing and the proliferation of smartphones and Internet-enabled handheld devices. Users are increasingly demanding services that can adapt to their current context. Hence, context-aware services need up-to-date context information to be able to adapt their behavior to current situations of users. We propose, in this paper, a framework for context information dissemination, which relies on negotiated Context Level Agreements (CLAs) between context consumers and context providers. A Context Broker (CB) helps context consumers select suitable context providers that can offer their required context information and fulfill their quality-of-context (QoC) requirements. Furthermore, the CB is in charge of negotiating the CLA terms—using a multi-attributes negotiation model—with a selected context provider on behalf of the context consumer.