ABSTRACT
Location awareness is the most important type of context, because the current (or future) location of users strongly influences their information needs. Applications in computing and communications utilize such location information in two distinct ways:
1. Location-aware computing: In this category, the information obtained by a mobile device or user varies with changes in the user’s location. The most-common goal on the network side is to automatically retrieve the current or anticipated neighborhood of the mobile user (for appropriate resource provisioning); on the device side, the typical goal is to discover appropriate local resources. As an example of this category, we can consider the case where mobile users would be automatically provided with local navigation maps (e.g., floor plans in a museum that the user is currently visiting), which are automatically updated as the device changes its current position.
