Environment-adaptive personal communications realizing ubiquitous computing networks

This paper is concerned with the realization of a ubiquitous computing network designed to improve the reachability of communications and to eliminate complex setup and manipulation related to communications. The new communication system EAPEC (environment-adaptive personal communications) is proposed. The communications context of the user, which changes from time to time, is automatically acquired. Based on that information, the communications terminal and the communications service/medium that are optimal for the receiver to receive the message are automatically selected. Then, according to the selection, the communications service or the communications medium is automatically converted. It is shown in this paper that EAPEC can be realized under the 3GPP (third-generation partnership project) IP network architecture. Placement of five functional modules in the network and the automatic acquisition procedure for communications context are described. As a means of performance evaluation, the call setup delay is evaluated by simulation, and guidelines for network design are obtained.