Energy Conservation in Mobile Devices and Applications: A Case for Context Parsing, Processing and Distribution in Clouds

Context information consumed and produced by the applications on mobile devices needs to be represented, disseminated, processed and consumed by numerous components in a context-aware system. Significant amounts of context consumption, production and processing takes place on mobile devices and there is limited or no support for collaborative modelling, persistence and processing between device-Cloud ecosystems. In this paper we propose an environment for context processing in a Cloud-based distributed infrastructure that offloads complex context processing from the applications on mobile devices. An experimental analysis of complexity based context-processing categories has been carried out to establish the processing-load boundary. The results demonstrate that the proposed collaborative infrastructure provides significant performance and energy conservation benefits for mobile devices and applications.