Advertisement Data Management and Application Design in WBCs Zhanlin Ji College of Computer and Automatic Control, Hebei United University, P.R.China Email: zhanlin.ji@ieee.org Ivan Ganchev, M´ airt´ ın O’Droma Telecommunications Research Centre, University of Limerick, Ireland Email: {Ivan.Ganchev, Mairtin.ODroma}@ul.ie Abstract— This paper describes the design and implementa- tion of the advertisement data management and correspond- ing intelligent application for use in wireless billboard chan- nels (WBCs) services in the emerging ubiquitous consumer wireless world (UCWW). Running at the application enabler sub-layer of a WBC service provider (WBC-SP)’s node the advertisement data is formatted by using the abstract syntax notation (ASN.1) and organized into segments to reduce the access time, and thus minimizing the mobile terminal’s (MT) energy consumption on this service. The intelligent application is implemented within three tiers of the WBC service layer: a service discovery and maintenance tier acting as a client-server distributed system for data collection and organization; an intelligent application tier holding all business logic and common application programming interfaces (APIs); and a multi-agent system (MAS) tier maintaining the advertisement, discovery and association (ADA) agents’ lifecycle, and supplying directory facilitator services and message transport services. The performance evaluation of the proposed data management scheme is performed. Details of the application’s architecture are also provided. Index Terms— Ubiquitous Consumer Wireless World (UCWW); Wireless Billboard Channel (WBC); Advertise- ment, Discovery and Association (ADA); Software Architec- ture; Multi-Agent System (MAS) I. I NTRODUCTION Wireless billboard channels (WBCs) [1] are novel UCWW infrastructural components for facilitating direct service advertisement of service providers wireless ser- vice offerings, and their discovery by MTs together with the means to associate with them for service purchase - the service advertisement, discovery and association func- tions (ADA), [2-3]. The UCWW mobile user (MU) is a consumer, not constrained to use, or bounded to, any particular access network provider (ANP). He/she may ac- cess teleservices through any available and suitable access network, and pay for the use of services through a trusted third-party authentication, authorization and accounting service provider. The consumer is free to choose what s/he perceives as ‘best’ for her/him, i.e. the teleservice and access network (AN) s/he considers best matches her/his Access Network 1 Access Network 2 Access Network 3 TeleService Providers Teleservice Providers UMTS WiFi WiMax WBC-SP Figure 1. The WBC in the UCWW environment. needs at any time or place (Figure 1). Since today’s long- term subscriber-like contracts are optional in UCWW and are unlikely to be the norm, maximizing the consumer wireless transactions, rather than subscriber contracts, becomes the main business driver for UCWW service providers. Service providers therefore need to be able to have a non-intrusive but direct ’push advertisements’ channel to advertise their mix of service offerings to consumers (including access networks’ communication service, ANCSs, and teleservices) [2]. Likewise con- sumers need to continually receive updates of the wireless services on offer in their local or in general. WBC advertisements enable them (i.e., WBC client-specific software application operating in the background of the MTS) to discover all services available/deployed in a given area/location and associate with the ‘best’ of them. This direct wireless ADA of wireless services over WBCs is thus a key aspect of the UCWW [1]. Corresponding to this foreseen demand, design of an efficient and easy mechanisms for wireless services ADA adapted to the mobile terminal (MT) capabilities, MU preference and location, is a clear research priority. The newly conceived WBC infrastructural component JOURNAL OF SOFTWARE, VOL. 6, NO. 6, JUNE 2011 1001 © 2011 ACADEMY PUBLISHER doi:10.4304/jsw.6.6.1001-1008