Future Services and Overlay Architectures: State of the Art Report 1. UBISERVE Project Deliverable D4.1

Abstract

The UBISERVE-project (Research on Future Ubiquitous Services and Applications) is a joint research effort dedicated to advance research in the field of ubiquitous services. The project focuses on future services building on mobile communication systems and services.

Within this Project, our aim in Work Package 4 is to develop an overall overlay architecture providing a rich set of service facilitators for mobile users of wireless convergence devices that contain hardware capabilities to accurately pinpoint their locations, possess multiple wireless interfaces and have large storage capacities. The architecture will also support contextually aware self-organising devices creating an on-demand, dynamic overlay, capable of supporting multipath, transport-independent communication among users and devices. Thus useful information needs to be gleaned from service providers, network operators, infrastructure, sensors and devices in the immediate operating environment.

This State of the Art document is the first project document which analyses the key enabling technologies for service overlays, platforms, frameworks and communication mechanisms for creating such architectures that would prove indispensable in the creation of future services. In short, the following questions are examined:

• What kinds of service overlays exist today? • How are service overlays relevant towards services in wireless devices? • What communication technologies can we expect future services to use? • What are the dominant development platforms for smartphone applications?