Delivery context negotiated by mobile agents using CC/PP

Abstract

Our approach to content negotiation is a framework of mobile agents, where the agents can migrate from user devices to negotiation servers in order to get access to more resources. We took this approach and now we introduce new features in the architecture. The key idea is content customisation depending on device description with CC/PP (Composite Capability/Preference Profile). The objective is twofold. First, to improve consumer experience adjusting contents to consumption devices. Second, to rationalise network and device use spending only the necessary resources. Altogether, it is a new step in the direction marked by the use of mobile agents in mobile devices. This way, computation and bandwidth consumption can be moved out of mobile devices to network devices, where these resources are cheaper. Moreover, in contrast to direct browser-server content negotiation, our agent based negotiation framework provides independence between content negotiation and its consumption, i.e. content can be negotiated and experienced in different user devices, thus better adjusting to user preferences. All this would be especially relevant when third generation (3G) mobile devices are widely available and more sophisticated multimedia content is available in mobile delivery contexts.