A Mobile Middleware Approach for the Convergence of Wide Area and Personal Area Networks

Evolving device capabilities and network technologies make the seamless combination of personal area and wide area networks capable and desirable to exploit advantages of each of the environments. By this, the vision of adaptive and context-aware service provision becomes possible and offers new opportunities for pervasive computing. In this paper, we describe an approach that addresses the convergence of personal area and wide area networks on the service level. We extend a middleware for mobile ad hoc networks to enable the remote access to personal multimedia content at home via a proper infrastructure and gateway. In a second step, we use this concept to enable the context-aware download of multimedia content to the mobile phone based on rules and a semantic blackboard approach.