A Context Aware Operating System

Abstract

An Operating System (OS) manages the hardware resources of a computer system, it can be a super computer or a hand-held device like a smart-phone. Context awareness has been a topic of discussion for a long time, however with the technological advances in smart-phones context awareness has opened new avenues. The increased hype about context awareness and smart-phones is due to the variety of sensors built into these devices. Currently smart-phones are using the underling sensors at the application level to make the applications context aware. However we believe utilizing these sensors at the OS level will enable systemwide context changes. We chose the Android platform, which is built on top of a Linux kernel to experiment this concept. We have considered the sensors GPS and MIC to detect the contexts - user location and background noise level. In this research we focused on the OS subsystem scheduler and evaluated the effectiveness of context aware scheduling which was followed up with a discussion about the future work and a conclusion.