BUILDING A HETEROGENEOUS SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE FOR THE WBC SERVICE LAYER

摘要

This paper proposes a heterogeneous software architecture for the service layer of wireless billboard channels (WBCs), which facilitates the IP datacasting (IPDC) of services' advertisements in a ubiquitous consumer wireless world (UCWW). The WBC service provider's central node 'pushes' these advertisements over the WBCs to the mobile user terminalsodes, which discover or update service offerings. Each user is thus supported in decision-making of the "best" service offerings matching their profile and their terminal's composite capabilities/preferences profile (CC/PP). The new WBC architecture consists of three tiers: a service discovery and maintenance tier acting as a client-server distributed system for data collection and organization; an intelligent application tier holding all business logic and common application programming interfaces (APIs); and a multi-agent system tier maintaining the advertisement, discovery and association (ADA) agents' lifecycle, and supplying 'directory facilitator' (DF) services and message transport services. A message channel, a blackboard and a gateway agent are shared by all three tiers thus enabling ADA processing in a highly efficient way.