A Generic Framework for Negotiations and Trading in Context Aware Radio

The support of reconfiguration requires the existence of negotiation procedures and trading rules connecting the device reconfiguration manager with the corresponding network proxies that will operate between the network proxies and the managed equipment, and will enable the exchange of information (e.g. mode availability, access network capabilities) or the ordering of certain procedures to take place. The task of the reconfiguration is to gather all the required software modules and carry out the individual reconfiguration steps. However, in the future mobile terminals will have access to different radio access technologies and utilize different communication protocols depending on the requested application QoS. Moreover context aware application should be developed that can adapt their level of functionality to dynamic radio resource restrictions like available bandwidth, delay and link interruptions. Therefore a generic software framework for adaptation and reconfiguration is a necessity. In this paper we propose a framework that supports the development of customized middleware, reconfigurable protocol stacks and adaptive application services in the three main layers of reconfiguration (infrastructure, application and user layers). The framework is composed of the following main phases: Profile and context management, Adaptations decision and trading rules and Realizations of the technical reconfiguration.