Context Provisioning in Cellular Networks

When people interact with each other, they implicitly make use of context information while intuitively deducing and interpreting their actual situation. Compared to humans, IT infrastructure cannot easily take advantage of context information in interactions. Typically, context information has to be provided explicitly. For a service to be context-aware it must be able to transparently adapt its behaviour to the user’s context. However, this assumes the acquisition, refinement, and dissemination of context. In cellular networks, the context provisioning is a complex and troublesome matter. It has to be organized in an inter-organizational manner, has to be adjusted to a variety of heterogeneous service platforms, and raises issues of massive scaling and data