Adaptive Personal Mobile Communication, Service Architecture and Protocols.

by Kanter, Theo

This dissertation addresses the applications, which are enabled by combining results from ubiquitous computing, mobile networks, and Voice over IP (VoIP) technologies and support for enabling users and applications to adapt to a more diverse communication environment. The cost to transmit digital information end-to-end is dropping dramatically, along with a tremendous increase in the available bandwidth in access networks for both fixed and wireless access. These trends have been accelerated by the large-scale deployment of broadband networks, which are an ideal base for adding wireless LAN extensions, providing order of magnitude increases in wireless bandwidth in comparison to the projected third-generation wireless networks. This motivates their complementary use in order to meet new user demand, and quickens the pace of on-going deregulation and separation of roles regarding provisioning of network access, services, and transport. Furthermore, short-range radio-link technologies facilitate new ways of interaction both between people & devices and between devices. The price/performance of end-user electronics drops along with a tremendous increase in computational power; this increased processing power can be used to deal with the increasingly diverse wireless infrastructure in an optimal way. Furthermore, these developments which have created affordable communication between users, computational devices, and resources have also removed a number of the limitations on the kind of services that were previously possible. We are now able to build new classes of end-user applications solely on top of IP (in particular where wireless access is involved). While a number of requirements on the network have been relaxed, this raises new questions, not only about which applications are enabled, but also about how users, mobile artifacts, and virtual objects can negotiate for services with a minimum of a-priori, shared knowledge, which also enables these entities to adapt to a diverse wireless communication infrastructure and available resources. These new requirements that are placed on the infrastructure, call for completely rethinking established service architectures for public mobile networks. This rethinking is expected to have far-reaching implications on how actors in the converging computing and communications industries will deliver services, and what services they will deliver. The dissertation first examines the feasibility of delivering mobile multimedia over wireless links with end-to-end IP connectivity. This is followed by an analysis of different service architectures for delivering these services and the necessary properties of a open model for describing, managing, using, and exchanging service components. A novel approach, called a ‘Mobile Interactive Space’, is presented that provides interaction between representations of people, devices, and resources, connected by ubiquitous communication. The research leading to this doctorate has created new network and system level models for building applications in which the new requirements and design-rules can be mapped, along with a synthesized protocol and specification language for describing, managing, using, and exchanging service components in a ‘Mobile Interactive Space’. An analysis of the implications of the above approach for new business models is presented, along with results from experiments giving evidence of the feasibility of the design of the architecture and its components, and for building solutions that deliver the new services and enable users to cope with a heterogeneous and deregulated communication environment. Finally, I discuss some topics for continued work regarding questions that were unearthed by the dissertation or for which no conclusive answer could be given. iii