Over the last decade there has been a rapid growth of wireless communication technology. While voice communication using cellular phones is already mature today, it is expected that with the evolution towards more intelligent devices personal multimedia applications will become an important part of our life tomorrow. The three main forces driving this mobile revolution are third generation of mobile communications (UMTS), the impact of IP-technology and the quest for service continuity. UMTS is seen as the enabler of wireless multimedia applications, overall (fixed-mobile, public-private, voice-data) convergence and the portability of a personalised service set across network and terminal boundaries, as defined in the Virtual Home Environment (VHE) system concept. Currently work is ongoing in different standardisation bodies (e.g. ETSI, 3GPP, ITU-T,...) and consortia (e.g. Parlay, 3G.IP,...) to standardise open interfaces towards the UMTS architecture, allowing third party application developers to easily exploit the service capabilities offered by underlying networks and terminals. The paper evaluates the current status of 'open interface' standardisation in 3GPP and sketches the role of the different service capabilities (e.g, MExE, SIM Application Toolkit, CAMEL,..,) in the overall network architecture. It explains the way 3GPP aims to realise the VHE concept via the implementation of the Open Service Architecture (OSA): by standardising 'service building blocks'-also referred to as service capability features (SCF). Finally this paper promotes the vision to extend this process of standardising SCF up to the level of network and terminal processing/execution environment characteristics. To illustrate one major advantage of this approach a case study is presented describing an algorithm that uses these so called standardised 'processing service capability features' to automatically select the most suitable processing execution environment for mobile multimedia applications.
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