Contextrank: Begetting Order to Usage of Context Information and Identity Management in Pervasive Ad-Hoc Environments

Contextual information and Identity Management (IM) is of paramount importance in the growing use of portable mobile devices for sharing information and communication between emergency services in pervasive ad-hoc environments. Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANets) play a vital role within such a context. The concept of ubiquitous/pervasive computing is intrinsically tied to wireless communications. Apart from many remote services, proximity services (context-awareness) are also widely available, and people rely on numerous identities to access these services. The inconvenience of these identities creates significant security vulnerability as well as user discomfort, especially from the network and device point of view in MANet environments. The need of displaying only relevant contextual information (CI) with explicit user control arises in energy constraint devices and in dynamic situations. We propose an approach that allows users to define policies dynamically and a ContextRank Algorithm which will detect the usability of CI. The proposed approach is not only efficient in computation but also gives users total control and makes policy specification more expressive. In this Chapter, the authors address the issue of dynamic policy specification, usage of contextual information to facilitate IM and present a User-centered and Context-aware Identity Management (UCIM) framework for MANets.