Managing Personal Communication Environments in Next Generation Service Platforms

The current access to mobile services a user has, is defined by the user's mobile terminal as the single entry point to an operators network. This comes along with a set of limitations. Although performance and multimedia capabilities of mobile devices are constantly increasing, user-service interaction is still limited due to physical constraints imposed by the form factor. Another drawback is the varying ability of devices to download and execute new services. At the same time it is not possible to synchronise, exchange or share the user's data and media content among different devices. In order to overcome these limitations this paper presents the concept of the Distributed Communication Sphere and the according architectural framework that allows its management. This framework defines functional components to enable multi-device delivery of communication and media service sessions, user input interpretation, terminal management and resource discovery. It also provides flexible service delivery through the dynamic desktop component and relies on intelligent service enablers of the underlying service platform architecture, such as context-awareness, service provisioning and personal profile enablers. The work has been performed as part of the EU IST-SPICE (027617) project targeting intelligent extensions for next generation service platforms.