Context aware services provide functionalities which are personalized for their users’ current situations. A main concern of context-aware services is a substantial consumption of resources while preserving a minimal level of accuracy. There is a tradeoff between efficiency and accuracy on context acquisition. Hence, we propose a cloud-based Context Acquisition Platform to provide a high-level of efficiency over a certain level of accuracy required by a context-aware service.
The platform mediates between context-aware services and sensors. With the platform, the context acquisition is only done by it and the context values are shared by multiple context-aware services, which can substantially reduce the cost to acquire context so that efficiency can be largely increased.