Context-aware mobile applications operating in environments with intermittent or unreliable connectivity must support offline-first behavior while preserving consistent decision-making and timely synchronization. Traditional cloud-centric architectures often fail to provide adequate availability, responsiveness, and reliable context reasoning under such conditions. This paper presents CAMS-F Edge DTN, an edge-centric runtime designed to support offline-first context-aware applications operating under intermittent connectivity. The proposed approach extends the CAMS domain-specific language (DSL) with declarative policies for semantic reconciliation, opportunistic synchronization, and context-aware conflict resolution. The runtime integrates Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs), opportunistic communication channels such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Direct, and MQTT-SN messaging to enable robust data exchange across mobile, vehicular, and edge nodes. CAMS F-Edge DTN supports offline-first execution by allowing applications to evaluate contextual rules locally and reconcile distributed state asynchronously when connectivity becomes available. The approach is evaluated through controlled experiments and case studies in rural logistics and healthcare distribution scenarios. The experimental results show that the proposed architecture maintains 96–99% operational availability under intermittent connectivity and up to 100% availability during fully offline operation, while achieving low-latency local reasoning (<10 ms median latency) and deterministic state convergence through CRDT-based synchronization mechanisms.
Herrera et al. (Thu,) studied this question.