Schilit et al. [94] describes the three important aspects of context as: the user’s location, other users in the vicinity, and the resources in the user’s environment. For example, in a mobile user’s perspective, ‘context’ means things such as lighting, noise level, network connectivity, communication costs, communication bandwidth, and even the social situation.
Importance of context-awareness for mobile clouds. Systems with context-awareness are able to use contextual information to change and automatically reconfigure their configurations to adapt to the context [44]. This behavior is very useful in the case of mobile systems since these deal with an execution environment that is subject to constant change. In the case of mobile cloud computing, context awareness can be used in forming resource clouds as well as processing information. For example, a device can infer its location through GPS, Bluetooth, or some other forms of positioning and use that information to prepare itself for upcoming processing.
In the rest of this section, we review the use of context-awareness for mobile cloud computing systems, and also discuss a key concern of mobile device, energy awareness.
