Establishing virtual home environment across terminals with diverse capabilities

Virtual home environment (VHE) is a personalization concept introduced by 3GPP (third generation partnership project). Its purpose is to enable users' personalized settings to be portable across network boundaries and between terminals. This paper addresses a subset of VHE features, and tries to solve the problems related to availability of personal service collection when users are switching terminals. Special consideration is given to filtering user profiles according to technical limitations of the currently used terminal, so that user's personal service environment is automatically adjusted to terminal capabilities. Implementation is based on mobile agents and CC/PP (composite capabilities/preference profiles) technology for description of terminal profiles.