Enhancing Existing Communication Services with Context Awareness

Context aware communication services rely on information sources and sensors, to derive users’ current situation and potential needs, and to adapt their communication services accordingly. If extensive studies have been driven on context awareness by industrials and researchers from academia, the design of such systems without modifying uses and manners of underlying communication services—while keeping them simple, intuitive, and reactive—remains a challenge. In this work, we introduce a context aware communication system that takes into account user’s preferences, workload, and situation to customize telephony services. In this implementation, we use IMS for communication management. The benefits of this implementation are the enhancement of IMS with context awareness features, and the coupling of user preferences with contextual information to provide improved service customization, without modifying the user experience. 1. Introduction In terms of usage, people still mostly use telephony like in the early 1970s; Alice dials Bob’s number and hears a ring back tone, Bob picks up if he is available, and both communicate. Also, communication systems typically ignore the callee’s situation when establishing a communication channel between him/her and the caller. For example the time might not be appropriate (e.g., the callee is in meeting), or the communication channel is not suitable (e.g., the callee is far from his fixed phone or is handling a mobile phone in a public space, such as a cinema). Recently, we are witnessing big advances in devices capabilities and technology as they become smarter with the introduction of sensors (e.g., accelerometer, GPS). These advances should help to improve the legacy telephony services and to design services in adequate way with users’ increasing requirements [1]. Now, effort of developing innovative communication services has to consider providing flexible mechanisms to support service adaptation based on observed changes in user situation. Context-aware communication (CAC) [6–8] services attempt to enhance communication systems with the ability to deduce callee and caller situations in order to decrease the probability of communication failures. The situation of a user can be defined as a snapshot of the user’s context at a certain instant or period of time. For a communication service, most relevant contextual information is user related (e.g., location, presence, and activity), device related (e.g., access network, battery level), and environment related (e.g., noise level). In order to enhance existing