Development of a context-aware messaging system over heterogeneous wireless networks

Integration of messaging services in heterogeneous wireless networks plays an important role in facilitating personal communications. Furthermore, supporting context-awareness drives wireless messaging services to the ubiquitous and human-centric extent. In this article we introduce a context-aware wireless messaging system in ubiquitous networking environment. The key concepts are (1) heterogeneous wireless data are accessed and translated by a gateway with corresponding networking interfaces or terminals; (2) a messaging service with always-best-connected capability is provided according to the context information collected by user's mobile or handheld devices; and (3) a Resource Description Framework (RDF) context server is used to manage all kinds of context information. With our system, users can enjoy the cost-effective and near-real-time communication even when they face network heterogeneity in the ubiquitous networking environment. This paper also describes the implementation of the system prototype to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.