Requirements, Limitations and Recommendations for Enabling End-to-End Quality of Context-Awareness in IoT Middleware

Satisfying a context consumer’s quality of context (QoC) requirements is of utmost importance to context management platforms (CMPs)in order to have credibility. QoC indicates the contextual information’s quality metrics (e.g., accuracy, timeliness, completeness). The outcomes of these metrics depend on the functional and quality characteristics associated with all actors (context consumers (or) context-aware applications, CMPs, and context providers (or) IoT-data providers) in context-aware ecosystems. This survey identifies and studies such characteristics and highlights the limitations in actors’ current functionalities and QoC modelling approaches to obtain adequate QoC and improve context consumers’ quality of experience (QoE). We propose an abstract system based on deductions from this study; this system addresses the functional limitations in existing QoC modelling approaches. Moreover, we have also highlighted those QoC metrics affected by quality of service (QoS) metrics in CMPs. These recommendations provide CMP developers with a reference framework they could incorporate and a list of QoS metrics that they need in order to maintain an adequate QoC.