Wireless Pers Commun (2010) 53:81–109 DOI 10.1007/s11277-009-9672-9 Management System for Terminals in the Wireless B3 World Panagiotis Demestichas · Apostolos Katidiotis · Dionysios Petromanolakis · Vera Stavroulaki Published online: 5 March 2009 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. 2009 Abstract In the era of wireless communications, Beyond the 3rd Generation (B3G), a network operator (NO) should satisfy numerous requirements, namely, personalis text awareness, always best connectivity, ubiquitous service provision and seamle A NO can efficiently satisfy the requirements by relying on the different radio net heterogeneous infrastructure, and potentially on other cooperating networks. In t the NO should possess advanced management mechanisms for driving its users to appropriate networks that satisfy the requirements. The presentation of such a m system is the specific contribution of this paper. The system is called Reconfigura nal Management System (RTMS). In general, it provides the means for profile mo acquisition of monitoring/discovery/context information, and the negotiation and of configurations, based on information deriving from policies, as well as the profi context. Our work focuses on the role and the information of the components of t Concrete functionality for accomplishing the role is also presented. Nevertheless, is open to the integration of alternate functionality. Our discussion includes a bus that presents in high-level terms the role of the management system, a detailed d of the components of the management system and results that show the efficiency management schemes. A summary and further research challenges, conclude this KeywordsConfiguration negotiation and selection · Profiles · Policies · Context awareness · Always-best connectivity 1 Introduction—Need for Advanced Terminal Management Functionality Advanced management functionality is required for terminals in the era of B3G (B the 3rd Generation) wireless communications [ 1–3]. This is due to: (i) the need to exploit the heterogeneous infrastructure through evolved terminals; (ii) the demanding r P. Demestichas ( B) · A. Katidiotis · D. Petromanolakis · V. Stavroulaki University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece e-mail: pdemest@unipi.gr 123