Toward context-aware location based services

The explosive growth of location detection devices, wireless communications, and mobile databases has resulted in the realization of location based services. Unfortunately, current location based services are rigid as they are isolated from various concepts of contextual information which include not only user's location but also user's preference, user's plan, network connectivity, etc. In this paper we propose an architecture of location based services which support context awareness. Within the architecture, we proposed key issues and corresponding solutions towards an efficient and practical realization of context-aware location-based services. Namely, we discuss the challenges for context management, service trigger mechanism and preference-based services.