Open Mobile Services

Motivation

Till now, mobile services are mostly deployed, operated and managed totally by the mobile operators. The mobile services are indeed quite "closed". Another closeness is related to the mobile devices where the functions are decided at factory time by the manufacturers. These closenesses impose severe limitations to mobile services that are delivered to the end-user via the mobile terminals. The situation changes and the demands for more advanced mobile services are getting more and more urging. This again increases the pressure to open the mobile services relating to the design, implementation, deployment, operation and management. To achieve that, it is crucial to have a sound architecture for future mobile services which takes into account new requirements and advances in technology.

Research Activities

Our research activities are aiming at contributing to the future open mobile services in three aspects:

• Universal personalised services
• Ambient intelligence
• Identity management

A. Universal personalised services:

The focus of this research activity is on:

• Future open mobile services should have an open architecture which is:
  • distributed in multiple networks, devices, domains
  • governed by multiple players: user, mobile operator, third parties, enterprise, etc.
  • ubiquitously available
  • personalised: customised to the user
  • continuous across devices, domains and networks
  • composable from atomic components
  • presentable to the users
  • adapted to the context
• The Service-Oriented Architecture is a new paradigm which is gaining momentum in the industry. It is powerful for the construction and operation of generic services. The basic SOA has characteristics that are beneficial for the realization of some of the critical functions in mobile services. It is therefore quite important to make use of SOA in the development of mobile services. It is quite important to identify their limitations and to propose SOA extensions for mobile services.
• The SOA technologies that are relevant to study are Web services, Semantic Web semantics, grid computing, Ontologies. It is very important to have practical activities that support and verify the theoretical ones. Indeed, a theoretical architecture without real implementation does not have any value.

B. Ambient intelligence:

Human beings are surrounded with more and more electronic devices. With the emergence of short-range wireless technologies, devices can communicate with each other. However, before an ambient intelligence in which devices collaborate to better serve human beings can be a reality many issues should be resolved. Communication between devices does not necessarily mean collaboration.

A middleware infrastructure called Virtual device that provides basic services such as device discovery, service discovery, resource discovery, user profile, Input/output transfer, application transfer, etc. must be introduced as fundament for the development of new services and applications. Future mobile services are services that are integrated in the environment and that communicate in an intuitive way to the users.

This research activity is aiming at realising the Virtual Device, ambient intelligence middleware and the new emerging mobile services. It consists of the following tasks:

• Virtual device middleware
  • identification of functions
  • architecture design
  • development of proof-of concept
• Study of related worksIt is quite important to study the topics which are related fields to the ambient intelligence such as:
  • M2M which has the focus on communication at the device level
  • Ubiquitous and pervasive computing which has the focus on Peer-to-Peer applications
• Study of short-range wireless technologies like Bluetooth, WLAN, Zigbee, 802.15

C. Identity management

Identification, authentication and access control are three of the fundamental functions in mobile communications. Before granting access to mobile telephony and SMS service the mobile user is authenticated by the SIM in the phone. Mobile services are now expanding to incorporate also mobile data services and it is now desirable to be able to use the Identification, authentication and access control functions for data services. Indeed, identity management is getting more and more important since the number of identities such as login name, account name, etc. that a user has, is increasing.

For a mobile user, it is quite critical since the identification and authentication capabilities may be quite limited. The Liberty Alliance specifications provide a standardised solution to this problem. The specified architecture will have impact on the architecture of mobile services. In addition, there are many issues which are not resolved and deserved more work such as unified strong authent ication, role management and privacy.

This research activity focuses on:

• Liberty-Alliance service architecture for mobile services:
  • Federation of identities
  • Single Sign-On
  • Attribute providers
  • Roaming between Circle of Trust
• Architectures for offering SIM authentication to all services
  • Architecture design
  • Implementation on various types of device
• Usage of other stronger authentication token:
  • USB-PKI devices
  • USB-SIM devices
  • GSM mobile phones

This activity is in collaboration with the Eureka project Mobicome - http://www.mobicome.org

Last edited: 31 Jan 2008