Centaurus: a framework for intelligent services in a mobile environment

In an age where wirelessly networked appliances and devices are becoming commonplace, there is a necessity for connecting them to work together for a mobile user. The design outlined in the paper provides an infrastructure and communication protocol for providing `smart´ services to these mobile devices. This flexible framework allows any medium to be used for communication between the system and the portable device, including infra-red, and BlueTooth. Using Extensible Markup Language (XML) for information passing, gives the system a uniform and easily adaptable interface. We explain our trade-offs in implementation and through experiments we show that the design is feasible and that it indeed provides a flexible structure for providing services. Centaurus provides a uniform infrastructure for heterogeneous services, both hardware and software services, to be made available to the users everywhere where they are needed