MONET Journal Special Issue on Personal Environment Mobility in Multi-Provider and Multi-Segment Networks 1Going Wireless, Enabling an Adaptive and Extensible Environment

This paper discusses limitations in existing and projected solutions for delivering applications to mobile users (e.g., in 3G) in an increasingly diverse heterogeneous wireless infrastructure in combination with the on-going deregulation of mobile communication and with an increasing number of more narrowly defined roles of parties participating in the delivery of applications to mobile users. Furthermore, for future service growth, users need to be the center of communication via applications that take into account the user’s context or the context of their communication based on any event and not just the invocation or release of communication resources. This calls for entirely rethinking the architectures and frameworks for the delivery of services, in order to create open and scalable support for the negotiation between participating entities with a minimum of a priori and shared knowledge, thus providing an adaptive and extensible environment for user-centric communication. This paper presents a novel architecture and components with these properties and discusses the merits of the approach, followed by a discussion of experimental results demonstrating the feasibility of applying this architecture.