Modelo e infraestructura de comunicaciones para servicios sensibles al contexto

Abstract

The appearance of concepts such as ¿Ambient Intelligent¿, ¿Ubiquitous Compu- ting¿ and ¿Context-Awareness¿ is causing the development of a new type of services ca- lled ¿Context-Aware Services¿ that in turn may affect users of mobile communications. These services allow users to get information adapted to their needs and preferences. This is a complex process because of the heterogeneity of contents, devices, objects, technologies, resources and users. Therefore it is necessary to have a local control of these parameters. In this sense, Wide Area Networks are not suf¿cient to solve this problem since they are oriented to remote multimedia services, with no interaction between objects from the same environment as the user. This thesis proposes the development of ¿Local Infrastructure¿ in order to provide intelligent, adaptable services to the user and solves the problem of local context control. In this thesis several contributions are presented: conceptual model for development of local infrastructure, an architecture design to control the service offered by the infras- tructure and, ¿nally, a few scenarios of use applications. The ¿rst contribution is summa- rized in two conceptual models that provide a new technology in order to context-aware services. The ¿rst model is designed to de¿ne the interaction between elements from the environment. It consists of four levels: conceptual bases for intelligent environment, ubi- quity in communication, tools and application concepts. The second model improves the user services and consists of ¿ve levels: infrastructure, technologies, capabilities, services and systems. Its aim is to complement the current existing communication infrastructure model. The second contribution is an architecture design based on the previous conceptual models and it is used to develop contextual services. The key issue of this architecture is that it makes use of a local infrastructure in order to operate adequately. This infras- tructure consists of an intelligent device network, called ¿Wireless Beacons¿, to link the personal portable device with the contextual services. The beacon design is modular, ¿exible, scalable and adaptable in order to tolerate new demand services whenever is needed. This is done in an autonomous way and adapted to the user preferences. Several prototypes have been made an adjusted to a number of services. These prototypes are manufactured with low-cost-off-the-shelf electronic modules. Finally, the architecture has been validated using real world scenarios such as: pro- ximity marketing, interactive tourism and monitoring cultural assets, etc. In this sense, results suggest that a wide range of new and useful applications, not conceived at origin, can be now developed.