Architecting IoT context storage management for context-as-a-service platform

Context-awareness in IoT applications is an emerging research field with profound impact on smartness, relevance, adaptability, dependability and flexibility of such applications. Relatively few substantial R&D projects have been carried out on how IoT-scale context can be stored, indexed, retrieved and provisioned to various IoT services. This paper addresses the challenge of building IoT context storage management system (CSMS) as a core component of Context-as-a-Service (CoaaS) platform which is a major focus of IoT-EPI project bIoTope. Motivation and conceptual architecture of context storage management system are presented and discussed. Elements of the reference architecture are also proposed. The paper concludes with highlighting the urgent need for developing CSMS and ways for architecting and implementing it.