Anonymous mobile service collaboration: Quality of service

Abstract

Mobile services depend on user context and preferences, and a mobile user’s context is constantly changing. Many services are only available locally. The most appropriate service for a user’s context is not known in advance and a user may enter or leave a service’s range at any time. For a seamless user experience, services need to collaborate. These complex collaborations should be instantaneous yet anonymous – without disclosing user information. The paper proposes a new service collaboration model using event-based interaction. A prototypical implementation is used to demonstrate functionality, inter-operability, and generality of our solution. The solution guarantees ad-hoc service collaboration while protecting user information.