Towards Seamless Service Mobility for Mobile Devices Communicating Within Wireless Grids

The proliferation of wireless infrastructures and devices is expected to enable new types of value-added applications. Example applications include support of a multi-player game where resources of different devices are shared to collaboratively play a game. Users of such applications require continuous and seamless access to resources while roaming between different access technologies. This calls for a generic wireless service management platform that adequately manages service discovery, distribution, security, billing, and mobility. This paper introduces a Service Roaming Protocol (SRP) as the mechanism to manage service mobility. SRP´s main advantage over exiting mobility management algorithm is its context-awareness. The SRP algorithm uses mobile user´s geographic location, terminal´s capabilities, personal profile, and resources of other grid devices, to provide efficient management of mobile users and services. SRP operation relies on primitives provided by a wireless grid middleware. These primitives include service definition and efficient service distribution and mobility. The wireless grid middleware provides a platform-independent solution to overcome heterogeneity of mobile terminals and provides autonomous service management for mobile grid users. This helps transforming a wireless infrastructure from an infrastructure built for only broadband Internet access into an infrastructure that supports collaborative applications.