Providing facilities to the visiting mobile user

While on the move the mobile user will definitely want to have access to the same applications in the same way as at home. However, he may want in addition to use the facilities available at the visiting site such as printers, fares, network connections, displays, applications, information, etc. He must first discover the available facilities, their locations and then do the appropriate re-configuration of his mobile computing entity. This could be an insurmountable task for a non-technical user and a time-consuming one for a user with technical skills. This paper focus on seamless facility discovery and offerings for the visiting user. The paper starts by examining the current facility discovery schemes, namely the NetSwitcher application, the Salutation Architecture and the Jini system. A solution for facility discovery and offerings using mobile agent technology is then presented. The paper also explains how different mobile computing entities are enabled to adapt and utilize the offered facilities. The paper concludes with some discussions and suggestions for future work