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.