User-oriented Addressing in Wireless Networks: Advanced Strategies and New Technical Solutions

In this paper, we present the concept of an individual communication address space (ICAS), which provides end users with dramatically improved flexibility in managing and sharing their (voice) communication addresses. The proposed concept puts end users into full control of their communication addresses instead of being tied to telephone numbers: users can define community-specific addresses in an Internet-style, control the lifetime of each address and their mapping to network addresses. In addition to plain-text addresses, RFID tag information can be used as alias names. The key components of the concept are an operator-independent, network-based database system, a client- based retrieval mechanism interacting online with the ICAS database and a proxy service allowing for the decoupling of network addresses and communication service addresses. The presented solution of a fully IP-based prototype implementation has proven the feasibility of the proposed architecture and was tested with end users for usability and performance aspects. As an intermediate solution improvements of the addressing mechanisms used in today´s mobile phone clients are introduced by leveraging GPRS/UMTS packet data channels for an overlay signaling protocol.