SCARAB: innovative services supporting user and terminal mobility

The paper presents the authors' experience in designing and implementing secure smart card and agent-based telecommunication services supporting user mobility and service personalization. The work described here has been performed as part of the EU ACTS SCARAB project and is based on a service architecture that has been defined by the SCARAB partners. User mobility is achieved both by using smart cards and by supporting mobile terminals based on a 3 Com Palm computer connected to a GSM phone, in addition to fixed PC-based terminals. An online travel agency service, that can be used to buy travel tickets, has been implemented as a case study. The paper focuses mainly on the description of the SCARAB service architecture and of the online travel agency demonstrative service and on its implementation for the mobile terminal, which is the most critical one, because of the severe resource limitations of Palm computers.