ID 520 1 Managing Personal Communication Environments in Next Generation Service Platforms Ralf Kernchen 1 , Matthieu Boussard 2 , Cristian Hesselman 3 , Claudia Villalonga 4 , Eric Clavier 5 , Anna V. Zhdanova 6 , Pablo Cesar 7 Abstract—The current access to mobile services a user has, is defined by the user’s mobile terminal as the single entry point to an operators network. This comes along with a set of limitations. Although performance and multimedia capabilities of mobile devices are constantly increasing, user-service interaction is still limited due to physical constraints imposed by the form factor. Another drawback is the varying ability of devices to download and execute new services. At the same time it is not possible to synchronise, exchange or share the user’s data and media content among different devices. In order to overcome these limitations this paper presents the concept of the Distributed Communication Sphere and the according architectural framework that allows its management. This framework defines functional components to enable multi-device delivery of communication and media service sessions, user input interpretation, terminal management and resource discovery. It also provides flexible service delivery through the dynamic desktop component and relies on intelligent service enablers of the underlying service platform architecture, such as context-awareness, service provisioning and personal profile enablers. The work has been performed as part of the EU IST-SPICE (027617) project targeting intelligent extensions for next generation service platforms. Index Terms—next generation service enablers, multimodal interfaces, multi-device environments, context-awareness, I. INTRODUCTION ITH the accelerating proliferation of networked multimedia and communication devices and their increasing functional richness, users can easily feel overwhelmed by the complexity imposed to manage their interoperability for certain user interaction needs. Proposals for the intelligent integration of such devices have been researched in relation to pervasive environments [1, 2] for example. However these efforts do not apply easily to mobile environments and their specific requirements. Typically, mobile users access their services in a constantly changing environment, so that user interfaces for user- service interaction, as can be composed from the available devices, changes frequently. The field of multimodal user interfaces in general provides the concepts for a more natural user interaction by allowing the integrating of modality user input from two or more input modes (e.g. speech, gestures, gaze, etc.) in combination with the coordinated presentation of multimodal output [3]. At the same time people tend to interact in a more multimodal fashion if tasks are getting complex [4]. However, the current state of the art shows some needs for further research, when it comes to the challenge to apply multimodal user interaction to changing mobile multi-device environments, as addressed in this paper. Initial work has been performed on this, as example for user interface adaptation for mobile terminals as described in [5]. Manuscript received January 31, 2006. This work was supported in part by the European Union Information Society Technology in the Sixth Framework Program under the contract number IST-027617 (SPICE project). 1 University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey GU2 7XH, United Kingdom (phone: +44-1483-683-423; fax: +44-1483-686-011; e-mail: r.kernchen@surrey.ac.uk). 2 Alcatel CIT, France (e-mail: Mathieu.Boussard@alcatel-lucent.fr). 3 Telematica Instituut, Netherlands (e-mail: cristian.hesselman@telin.nl). 4 NEC Europe Ltd., Germany (e-mail: claudia.villalonga@netlab.nec.de). 5 France Telecom R&D, France (e-mail: eric.clavier@orange-ftgroup.com). 6 University of Surrey, United Kingdom (e-mail: a.zhdanova@surrey.ac.uk). 7 Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica, Netherlands (e-mail: p.s.cesar@cwi.nl). Another limitation is imposed by the trend of user created content and media content in general, which usually is stored in a distributed fashion amongst different devices. The sharing, exchanging and synchronisation of the content in the different environments can require huge efforts, especially when users want to do it manually. Hence it should be supported automatically and optimally by the mobile operator platform. The third drawback comes from the fact that service software updates and new services download and execution in general are only supported in a limited fashion. Proposing new services based on the changing context situation such as the location of the user is not supported by the current functionalities at all. Therefore to overcome the limitations in the mentioned areas of user-service interaction in multi-device environments, user data synchronisation and dynamic service updates, the paper proposes an architecture approach namely the Distribute Communication Sphere (DCS) management system. The paper is structured as follows. Section II provides a summary of challenges that arise when addressing the limitations on multi-device user-service interaction, user data management and dynamic service updates. Based on this section III introduces the DCS management architecture addressing the challenges. Characteristic use cases for the W