Support for personal and service mobility in ubiquitous computing environments

This paper describes an agent-based architecture that extends personal mobility to ubiquitous environment. A software agent, running on a portable device, leverages the existing service discovery protocols to learn about all services available in the vicinity of the user. Short-range wireless technology such as Bluetooth can be used to build a personal area network connecting only devices that are close enough to the user. Acting on behalf of the user, the software agent runs a QoS negotiation and selection algorithm to select the most appropriate available service(s) to be used for a given communication session, as well as the configuration parameters for each service, based on session requirements, the user preferences and the constraints of the devices that provide the service(s). The proposed architecture supports also service hand-off to take account of service volatility as a result of user mobility.