  Ubiquitous computing environments are characterised by smart, interconnected
artefacts embedded in our physical world that are projected to provide useful
services to human inhabitants unobtrusively. Mobile devices are becoming the
primary tools of human interaction with these embedded artefacts and
utilisation of services available in smart computing environments such as
clouds. Advancements in capabilities of mobile devices allow a number of user
and environment related context consumers to be hosted on these devices.
Without a coordinating component, these context consumers and providers are a
potential burden on device resources; specifically the effect of uncoordinated
computation and communication with cloud-enabled services can negatively impact
the battery life. Therefore energy conservation is a major concern in realising
the collaboration and utilisation of mobile device based context-aware
applications and cloud based services. This paper presents the concept of a
context-brokering component to aid in coordination and communication of context
information between mobile devices and services deployed in a cloud
infrastructure. A prototype context broker is experimentally analysed for
effects on energy conservation when accessing and coordinating with cloud
services on a smart device, with results signifying reduction in energy
consumption.
