The concept of a personal distributed environment for wireless service delivery

Traditionally wireless service delivery has been restricted in scope to voice and text messaging and has been targeted at a single user device. Increasing interest is now being shown in ubiquitous delivery of services, including many forms of information and entertainment services, over a variety of wireless delivery mechanisms and to a collection of devices controlled by an individual user. These devices may be both local and remote to the user but their combination, and the services provided, form the user's personal distributed environment (PDE). This paper reviews the concepts associated with a PDE and highlights some of the technical problems which require to be addressed in order to make such an environment a self-organising and attractive proposition from the user viewpoint. The paper defines the elements of a personal distributed environment and concentrates on the issues of personal access management and personal service management. It illustrates typical signalling exchanges required for the control of devices within the PDE and stresses the way in which the PDE may be attached to the core network. The paper will also illustrate a typical scenario in which a PDE might be deployed and will highlight the very important issues of security which must be incorporated in the overall PDE management.