DESIGN OF AN ENVIRONMENT-ADAPTIVE ARCHITECTURE FOR PERSONAL COMMUNICATIONS

摘要

This paper describes the design of an environment-adaptive personal communications (EAPEC) architecture for use in the next generation of wide-area mobile computing networks. The EAPEC system accepts communications from senders, automatically selects the most appropriate communications device, medium, and service for the intended receiver, converts the sender's message into the selected form, and forwards the converted message to the receiver. EAPEC eliminates the need for users to carry out complicated communications-related manual operations while enhancing the accessibility of receivers. The EAPEC is implemented by adding functional components of five types to the 3GPP-based IP network in which the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) is combined with the CC/PP (Composite Capability/Preference Profiles) framework, as discussed in W3C. These functional components include a universal communication navigator (UCN), a media-processing server (MPS), a location server (LS), a terminal profile database (TPD) and a user profile database (UPD). The EAPEC architecture is evaluated in terms of the means and 95th percentiles of call-setup times by theoretical analysis and simulation. Performance analysis indicates that the performance of application servers and degrees of server utilization greatly affect the call-setup times while the IP-network delay does not have much effect under practical conditions.