An open service architecture for adaptive personal mobile communication

Currently, 3GPP is reinventing the telecom model of services in wireless Internet — a model that is not well suited to (1) meet the demands for new modes of personal mobile communication, enabled by wireless packet services and multimedia devices, or (2) the ability to deal with increasingly heterogeneous wireless infrastructure (one interpretation of 4G). This article characterizes the properties of service architectures in relation to the steps taken in successive generations of wireless communication networks for personal communication. The article then continues to present a novel service architecture for open communication in wireless Internet, describing its necessary properties and evaluating its merits. Finally, we present our experiences from building application prototypes based on our service architecture, in an urban wireless testbed consisting of WLAN extensions to a Gigabit-Ethernet network.