Abstract. This paper discusses models of generic mobile services. The goal is to gain understanding of the challenges in designing, developing and deploying advanced mobile data services. First, a composition model describing the components of a generic mo

Towards Service Continuity for Generic Mobile

Services

Ivar Jørstad1, Do van Thanh2 and Schahram Dustdar3

1 Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Dept. of Telematics, O.S. Bragstads

plass 2E, N-7491 Trondheim, Norway

ivar@ongx.org

2 Telenor R&D, Snarøyveien 30 N-1331 Fornebu, Norway

thanh-van.do@telenor.com

www.1mpi.com

3 Vienna University of Technology, Distributed Systems Group (DSG), Information Sys-

tems Institute A-1040 Wien, Argentinierstrasse 8/184-1, Austria

dustdar@infosys.tuwien.ac.at www.1mpi.com

Abstract. This paper discusses models of generic mobile services. The goal is to gain understanding of the challenges in designing, developing and deploying advanced mobile data services. First, a composition model describing the com-ponents of a generic mobile service and the components relationships is given. Second, distribution models describing the distributions of the components in the former model across hosts, networks and domains are presented. After pre-senting these generic models, a brief mobility analysis is carried out, followed by a discussion of mobility and service continuity dependency on the service distribution. The functions necessary to provide service continuity are identi-fied and incorporated in a service continuity layer.

1 Introduction

Till now, the focus in mobile communications has been on providing service con-tinuity of communication services when a mobile terminal is roaming between net-works, i.e. avoiding abruption of access. The underlying mechanism for achieving service continuity is called handover or handoff. With the increasing number of de-vices that users have at their disposition, it is quite relevant to provide service conti-nuity across heterogeneous devices. For example, a user, when arriving at the office, may want to transfer the conversation session from the mobile phone to the multime-dia PC acting as an IP phone. The goal of this paper is to examine how service conti-nuity can be provided. The paper adopts a formal and analytical approach. It starts with an analysis of current services and derives the functions and capabilities that are necessary to achieve service continuity.