A Personal Content Manager Architecture for a Personal Distributed Environment

This paper focuses on determining a personal content manager (PCM) architecture most suitable for use with a personal distributed environment (PDE), where a diverse range of heterogeneous devices on different sub-networks communicate with one another. Three different PCM deployment architectures, based on the knowledge of content residing in a PDE were investigated. A simulation of a content management task was done to compare the performances of these architectures in a simple PDE scenario. The simulation studies provided a comparison of the performance of the PCM architectures from both the user´s and system´s perspectives and allowed the most competent architecture to be chosen for implementation in the PDE. This research has been funded by the Industrial Companies who are Members of Mobile VCE, with additional financial support from the UK Governments Technology Strategy Board (previously DTI).