Spyridon Panagiotakis

Intelligent service mediation for supporting advanced location and mobility-aware service provisioning in reconfigurable mobile networks

Service differentiation, customization, and personalization in the market of 3G mobile services and applications has caused many standards groups, telecommunication companies, and institutions to introduce advanced frameworks and architectures for the support of flexible service provisioning. An important feature in such architectures is location information management, which is a key aspect in future mobile systems and networks, enabling new approaches to service provisioning, customization, and personalization. We present our proposal for a generic open flexible service provisioning architecture that supports location-aware service provisioning and management.

Integrated generic architecture for flexible service provision to mobile users

The evolution of 3/sup rd/ generation mobile systems introduces a new era in advanced multimedia service provision to mobile users. The concepts of service adaptability, downloadability and network reconfigurability based on terminal and user profiles and capabilities are aspects to be considered in the context of future mobile systems and networks enabling new approaches in service provision. A generic architecture and functionality is presented for third party service registration, discovery, management and adaptable provision to mobile users.

Context-Aware Composition of Mobile Services

This paper describes an intelligent distributed framework that enables the dynamic composition of mobile services and applications based on existing services and technologies, while enriching them with high-level and up-to-date contextual information. The framework makes the service implementation totally platform-unaware, thus increasing the number of potentially available services and shortening application time-to-market

An advanced service provision framework for reconfigurable mobile networks

The success of next generation mobile networks is highly dependent on the availability of a plethora of functionality-rich applications, accessible via a variety of network infrastructures and terminals. This can be achieved through the cooperation of various business players in addition to network operators and infrastructure providers. The specification by major standardisation organisations of open APIs for network access by third parties is a significant step in this direction. A critical issue in such architectures is reconfiguration management, which is regarded as the mean to enable new approaches to service provision, customisation and personalisation. In this paper, we present our proposal for a generic, open, flexible, service provision framework that supports context-aware service provision and reconfiguration management.

An advanced location information management scheme for supporting flexible service provisioning in reconfigurable mobile networks

The evolution of third-generation mobile communications networks has nominated the requirements for flexible service provisioning, intelligent and customized charging, as well as location-aware service and data management as key enablers for the support of new advanced service offerings to mobile users. Our work is related to the design and implementation of a flexible service provisioning and reconfigurability management middleware for third-generation systems and beyond. The article focuses especially on the location-related features and functionality of our architecture, discussing the interactions required to accomplish location- and mobility-aware user profiling, service deployment and discovery, as well as charging and billing.

Generic framework for the provision of efficient location-based charging over future mobile communication networks

The provision of location-based services is expected to have essential impact in the competition among 3G network operators. To support the realization of this functionality the standard UMTS infrastructure will probably need to be supplemented with additional intelligent components. Furthermore, flexible location-based charging mechanisms have to be designed and deployed to allow subscribers to be charged with different rates, depending on their location and profiles. In this paper a proposed platform for location-aware service provision is introduced and the interactions among its constituent components for applying an efficient location-based charging scheme are discussed in detail.

CONTEXT-AWARENESS AND USER PROFILING IN MOBILE ENVIRONMENTS

The evolution of mobile communication systems to 3G and beyond introduces requirements for flexible, customized, and ubiquitous multimedia service provision to mobile users. One must be able to know at any given time the network status, the user location, the profiles of the various entities (users, terminals, network equipment, services) involved and the policies that are employed within the system. Namely, the system must be able to cope with a large amount of context information. The present paper focuses on location and context awareness in service provisioning and proposes a flexible and innovative model for user profiling. The innovation is based on the enrichment of common user profiling architectures to include location and other contextual attributes, so that enhanced adaptability and personalization can be achieved. For each location and context instance an associated User Profile instance is created and hence, service provisioning is adapted to the User Profile instance that better apply to the current context. The generic model, the structure and the content of this location- and context-sensitive User Profile, along with some related implementation issues, are discussed.

LIAISON Customised Billing Module

In the framework of the LIAISON (location bAsed services for the enhancement of wOrking enviroNment) IP project the existing legendary charging functionality is complemented with new features fulfilling the emerging charging requirements for an integrated environment providing mobile workers with location-based services. In that scope, LIAISON introduces the LIAISON customised billing module (namely the LCBM), an integrated customised billing module, which collects the charging information from each, potentially different, business domain, calculates the charges that are due to each involved business entity and shares the respective revenues. The LCBM covers the emerging requirements of an integrated environment enabling LIAISON solution to provide mobile workers with advanced location-based services. It receives charging information from heterogeneous environments through open application programming interfaces (APIs), applies the appropriate pricing policy based on the user or/and service profile and calculates the apportioning revenues between the actors.