Distributed Clients’ Profile Management System for Pervasive Systems
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Date
2005-11
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The heterogeneity of device capabilities, user’s context and communication network that
exists in pervasive systems has accentuated the need for a content adaptation. The
purpose of the content adaptation is to convert the original content before delivery so that
the new content would fit to the capability of the client’s device being used, the available
bandwidth of the communication network, and the specific need of the user. In order to
perform such an adaptation, the adaptation system is required to maintain adequate
information about the clients’ profile, the network profile, the content profile and others.
This thesis work deals with the management of the clients’ profile that includes device
and user profile. Specifically, it tries to set up an appropriate way of managing clients’
profile in pervasive environment in relation to content adaptation. To this end, a
distributed clients’ profile management scheme is proposed in the current work. In the
design of the management scheme, two issues have been considered: (a) client’s profile
characteristics such as existence of confidential information in the client’s profile,
temporal nature of some of the profiles, etc. (b) constraints that exist in the pervasive
systems such as heterogeneity of the client devices in terms of storage, processing, and
display capabilities, mobility of the clients, etc. Based on the profile characteristics and
the constraints of pervasive systems, we proposed to fragment the client’s profiles into
two: those that can be kept on the client devices and those that can be kept on the server
side. The main consideration of this fragmentation is the security issue of confidential
profiles and the storage size constraint of the client devices. In the proposed architecture,
the server side profiles are, in turn, distributed on the local servers to meet the
requirements such as availability of profile information in partial failure of the system,
performance, scalability, etc.
The proposed system consists of different components that interact with each other
through web interfaces for the management of distributed client’s profile in a transparent
way. It also provides interfaces to external components such as automatic profile
extractors so that the dynamic profiles will be built in the course of service provision
Description
Keywords
Profile Management; System