Device selection by personal proxy agent in a wireless environment.

Abstract

A multitude of machines surrounds people at home, at the office or in public places. These machines range from small to big devices, small microprocessors to powerful ones. Each time the user changes location, he faces a new set of devices so the need to make those devices collaborate and interact with each other fascinates many researchers. We know this as a pervasive computing environment. While many projects focus on the device and session mobility for telecommunication applications, few if any, take into account the multimedia Quality of Service (QoS) parameters in satisfying user requirements. This project proposes a new architecture for mobile communication services, which includes QoS management. Our architecture intends to achieve three main goals: (1) The user is always connected, so he/she is always reachable; (2) It allows the user to select and access services on devices in his personal working area; and (3) It builds a composite/virtual machine by combining one or more services of several devices to give the illusion of being one single distributed machine. To construct this architecture we introduce a new component that we call Personal Proxy Agent (PPA). This PPA is the heart of our architecture. It will be the medium between the user's Home Directory and the user himself. The user receives incoming requests/calls and sends outgoing requests/calls through his PPA. The PPA will act on behalf of the user to detect, select and build composite devices that satisfy his preferences and requirements. As a proof of concept, we built a prototype that uses Bluetooth components for wireless device interaction, the Jini protocol for service location and the SIP protocol for request processing.