Relating Context and Self Awareness in the Internet of Things

Context- and self- awareness are two terms that have been living with us for many years. In principle, both state a similar meaning even though the literature points out a very different path. One is inspired by location-related mechanisms in mobile environments, whereas the other is inspired by biology. In the area of the Internet of Things, the term context-awareness has seen a higher adoption in the field of Cloud Computing, while the term self-awareness is more widely used in the area of Wireless Sensor Networks. This paper evaluates the entire IoT Cloud-to-Thing Continuum in an attempt to reconcile both terms. We contextualize and discuss the literature around context and self-awareness, and we propose a conceptual architecture that handles both concepts, with the aim of having a better understanding of how to develop a software environment that integrates both concepts. To show the real-life applicability of our proposed architecture, it is introduced in a realistic setting such as wildfire monitoring, including a conceptual overview of how the proposed architecture could be implemented in this domain. Additionally, our evaluation of a river flooding scenario concluded that the proposed architecture significantly reduced flood detection delay by over 47% compared to the naive method and over 20% compared to standalone self-awareness and context-awareness methods.