HotTown, enabling context-aware and extensible mobile interactive spaces

This article introduces a novel, open, and scalable service architecture for context-aware personal communication. In contrast to the network-centric open service access in third-generation mobile networks, this architecture moves the point of integration for user services out to the mobile devices, where we can create support for context-aware computing and communication. Support for peer-to-peer service negotiation with minimal a priori shared knowledge, context representation, and reasoning about context enables the mobile agents (that represent users and other entities) to be aware of and react to any event and thus context. Hence, the delivery of context-aware applications to users intertwining digital and physical objects in mobile interactive spaces leverages events from sensors, mobility support, and digital entities. Finally, a presentation of our prototype and experiences from the HotTown project demonstrates the feasibility of the approach and provides some examples of the enabled user communication for large-scale mobile networks.