A smart network with active services for wireless context-aware multimedia communications

This paper presents the design and analysis of a novel smart network concept with active services for supporting mobile wireless multimedia communications. The smart network concept includes active services, context-awareness, and user-awareness. The design principle of a smart network is simple and smart: it only adds two major software entities to a wireless network - a smart agent and context knowledge base (CKB) which contains a user's physical, social, and psychological environment information. The CKB can be distributed among different servers. User environment data is sensed by the smart multimedia terminals and stored in the CKB. Upon a request, the smart agent searches the CKB, analyzes and presents its user context information to the requester. The multimedia terminal is smart card driven. Functions of the multimedia terminal including eyeglass-based display, headphone, wearable keyboard and radio devices are distributed around body where they are most convenient for the user and the devices communicate with each other through a PAN (personal area network).