Centaurus: a framework for intelligent services in a mobile environment

Abstract

In an age where wirelessly networked appliances and devices are becoming commonplace, there is a necessity for connecting them to work together for a mobile user. The design outlined in the paper provides an infrastructure and communication protocol for providing 'smart' services to these mobile devices. This flexible framework allows any medium to be used for communication between the system and the portable device, including infra-red, and BlueTooth. Using Extensible Markup Language (XML) for information passing, gives the system a uniform and easily adaptable interface. We explain our trade-offs in implementation and through experiments we show that the design is feasible and that it indeed provides a flexible structure for providing services. Centaurus provides a uniform infrastructure for heterogeneous services, both hardware and software services, to be made available to the users everywhere where they are needed.