Flow Context Tags: Concepts and Applications

Context awareness can help build dynamic networks by enabling them to automatically adapt to the user’s activities, computational environment, and network conditions. Our approach in building context-aware networks uses flow context: information about the intrinsic and low-level characteristics of flows, as well as the nature of the applications, devices, and the activities, intentions, preferences or identities of the users that produce or consume them. We tag network flows with their associated context, enabling the information to be shared and acted upon within the network and end-devices. We establish the conceptual framework behind this approach and present some application scenarios, particularly in mobility and QoS adaptation.