Characterization of Mobile Services in Heterogeneous Communication Environments

The term “service” is quite overused in the telecommunications research area. This paper continues previous research by the author toward a better understanding of the service concept. The term service in this paper means the “something” that a human user receives from the computing environment that includes mobile and fixed devices, various kinds of interconnected networks forming a larger whole, and a variety of existing software. The main concern of this paper is to derive a set of essential properties of services within heterogeneous networks. It also defines the relationships among established properties and references each of them to a certain functional layer within a service conceptual model. Finally, this paper represents an example of “service content value”-based classification and the service characterization framework using an ontological representation