Advanced adaptability and profile management framework for the support of flexible mobile service provision

Abstract

The long-term vision of beyond 3G wireless communications describes a mobile service provision environment dramatically different from that of today. Users are expected to raise their demands to a significantly higher level, towards the situation-aware provision of ubiquitous personalized multimedia services. From this perspective, the need is emerging to apply, in a systematic way, adaptability and reconfigurability concepts for service delivery in largely diverse contexts. Generic dynamically extensible adaptation mechanisms that can be employed in a wide variety of situations and are independent of the subject and criteria of adaptation is a significant step in this direction. Moreover, effective profile representation and management becomes an increasingly important issue. In the present article we introduce an advanced adaptability and profile management framework aiming to fulfill these requirements. The proposed system has been designed, implemented, and incorporated in a distributed middleware platform for next-generation mobile service provision.