Building a heterogeneous software architecture for the WBC service layer

This paper proposes a heterogeneous software architecture for the service layer of wireless billboard channels (WBCs), which facilitates the IP datacasting (IPDC) of services' advertisements in a ubiquitous consumer wireless world (UCWW). The WBC service provider's central node 'pushes' these advertisements over the WBCs to the mobile user terminals/nodes, which discover or update service offerings. Each user is thus supported in decision-making of the "best" service offerings matching their profile and their terminal's composite capabilities / preferences profile (CC/PP). The new WBC architecture consists of three tiers: a service discovery and maintenance tier acting as a client-server distributed system for data collection and organization; an intelligent application tier holding all business logic and common application programming interfaces (APIs); and a multi-agent system tier maintaining the advertisement, discovery and association (ADA) agents' lifecycle, and supplying 'directory facilitator' (DF) services and message transport services. A message channel, a blackboard and a gateway agent are shared by all three tiers thus enabling ADA processing in a highly efficient way.