Evolution of Context Aware Services in Next Generation Mobile Service Environment

Mobile communication is evolving toward next generation system that is capable to provide ubiquitous human-centric services with giving no restriction on time and location. In particular, context-awareness will be realized using various sensors and devices and related technologies under the ubiquitous Next Generation (NG) mobile communications environment where user's demand and surrounding context are changing dynamically. By such context awareness, context aware service which provides best suitable services for a user by analyzing user's needs and situational information, will be one of the promising NG mobile services. In this article, we propose NG mobile service environment with focusing on generic service traffic flows supported by the NG service platform which gives various means of connecting users and service providers. Then, we propose evolutional phases of context-aware services based on ranges of context information and evolutional trend of telecommunication technologies and networking environment in NG mobile service environment.