The Simplicity project and its demonstrator: improving ease of use and personalization of ICT services G. Bartolomeo, N. Blefari Melazzi, F. Martire, S. Salsano DIE, Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”, {giovanni.bartolomeo, blefari, francesca.martire, stefano.salsano}@uniroma2.it S Kapellaki, E. Koutsoloukas, G. N. Prezerakos 1 , N.D. Tselikas, I.S. Venieris Intelligent Communications & Broadband Networks Lab School of Electrical & Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens {sofiak, lefterisk, prezerak, ntsel}@telecom.ntua.gr, venieris@cs.ntua.gr Abstract- As technology develops, people are using an ever broader and heterogeneous range of ICT devices and network-based services. The result is an enormous burden of complexity on the shoulders of users, service providers and network operators. The goal of the Simplicity project, supported by the European Union, is to reduce this complexity by: i) providing automatic customization of user access to services and the network; ii) automatically adapting services to terminal characteristics and user preferences; iii) orchestrating network capabilities. The Simplicity approach is based on a personalization device, the so-called Simplicity device, which, together with a brokerage framework, offers transparent service configuration and runtime adaptation, according to user preferences and computing/networking context conditions. This paper presents the Simplicity project, briefly discusses its architecture and introduces the Simplicity demonstrator: a proof of concept implementation used to verify our approach, through diverse usage scenarios. In addition, we introduce the main aspects of a follow-up project of Simplicity, named SMS. Keywords- personalization, service adaptation, pervasive, context, simplicity 1 I INTRODUCTION The Simplicity project is a European Union program, which lasted 26 months (January 2004 - February 2006), and included 11 major European industrial organizations, network operators, SMEs, research labs and universities [1], [2]. The project ended on the 10 th of February with a final review that classified it as “highly successful”. The project web site contains papers, public deliverables, movies, presentations and other material that describes our work in the last two years. The aim of this paper is to present the Simplicity demonstrator, which has been recently completed. Before presenting the demonstrator, we need to introduce the main aspects of Simplicity and of its architecture, which we will do in this introduction. Then, we will present key Simplicity systems and finally the demonstrator. The acronym, Simplicity, intends to convey the very aim of the project: design and deploy a brokerage level allowing i) easy personalization of services to match user preferences and needs, ii) seamless portability of services, applications and sessions across heterogeneous terminals and devices, and iii) smooth adaptation of services to available networking and service support technologies and capabilities. The personalization concept is based on a user profile. In our 1 G. N. Prezerakos is also with the Technological Education Institute of Piraeus view, each user will be provided with a personalized profile, giving access to different services, and using heterogeneous classes of terminals. The personalized user profile will allow automatic, transparent customization and configuration of terminals/devices and services, uniform mechanisms for recognizing, authenticating, locating and charging the user, policy- controlled selection of network interfaces and applications services. Thanks to the profile, users will also enjoy the automatic selection of services appropriate to specific locations (e.g. the home, buildings, public spaces), the automatic adaptation of information to specific terminal devices and user preferences, and the easy exploitation of different telecommunications paradigms and services. The user profile will be stored in a, so-called, Simplicity Device (SD). Though it seems natural to think of the SD as a physical device, (e.g., an enhanced SIM card, a Java card, a USB stick, a sensor, etc.), the SD could also be implemented as a network location or a software agent. In some case the physical SD could store “pointers” to complete profile information, which resides in the network. If the SD is a physical device, users could personalize terminals and services by the simple act of plugging the SD into the chosen terminal. The Simplicity system also encompasses a Brokerage Framework. This brokerage level will use policy-based technologies (e.g. policies for mobility support, QoS, security, SW downloads) to orchestrate and adapt network capabilities, taking into account user preferences and terminal characteristics. The main components of the Simplicity system are the SD, the Terminal Brokers (TBs), the Simplicity Personal Assistant (SPA) and the Network Brokers (NBs). The Simplicity system can interact with existing (“legacy”) application and services and with external applications which are designed to exploit the capability of the system (denoted as “Simplicity enabled 3rd party applications”). The role of the SD, as discussed above, is to store user’s profiles, preferences and policies. It also stores and allows the enforcement of user-personalized mechanisms to exploit service fruition, to drive automatic adaptation to terminal capabilities, and to facilitate service adaptation to various network technologies and related capabilities. The TB manages the interaction between the information stored in the SD and the terminal in which the SD is plugged in. The SD enables the TB to perform actions like adaptation to networking capabilities and to the ambient, service discovery and usage, adaptation of services to terminal features and capabilities. The TB