Preference-based session management for IP-based mobile multimedia signaling

The increasing variety of mobile multimedia services raises the need for mechanisms to select those services whose capabilities best match individual user requirements. In this paper we present an advanced concept for service personalization in next-generation IP-based mobile systems based on the notion of user preferences. The described concept features several enhancements for personalization, including the intuitive modeling of user preferences, the construction of complex preference terms from basic preference expressions and a stepwise refinement of profiles and preferences. We describe this solution applied to the signaling mechanism of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which is the protocol suite for application control in current IP-based mobile communication systems such as UMTS. In particular, our preference concept for personalized service management extends the conventional SIP preference modeling methods proposed so far: a preference order on the available service features is introduced that accounts for the specific demands of a user without a numerical ranking of features. We show how base preferences can be intuitively combined to complex preference expressions and explain how these relate to standard SIP feature preferences.