Reachability of Services in a Mobile Environment
Reinhard Kronsteiner,
Johannes Kepler University Linz
Dept. of Telecooperation
Reinhard.Kronsteiner@jku.ac.at
Summary
The use of wireless communication technology
enhances the potential of mobile computing.
Penetration with web-technology led to information-
overload. Following the trend of ubiquitous
computing and always-on connectivity. A service in
the terminology of information technology is usually
the access to information or infrastructure with
economic purpose. For mobile services it will come
to a non-manageable service-overload. Although we
are permanently in coverage of many services, only a
subset of them is relevant to us in our actual context.
Limitation via restricted reachability to offered
services is a way to keep the service landscape
manageable for the user. This paper introduces a
notion to classify services out of their reachability and
offers workarounds to service-filtering..
Keywords
Reachability, context-awareness, location-based-
services, service- provision.
1. Introduction
GSM, HSCD, GPRS, UMTS Bluetooth and
WLAN are state of the art enabling technologies for
mobile information service provision. The user carries
a mobile device and is able to receive services via
wireless communication channels and is consequently
technically reachable anytime and anyplace.
Increasing mobility and the users acceptance for
mobile devices lead to an enormous market in the
information service sector. The number of accessible
services grows in short frequency. The amount of
available service will become more and more
inscrutable. The deficit of small displays and poor
input capabilities of this devices leads to a restricted
amount of usable services. To get rid of this problem
the amount of accessible services needs to be filtered
with the focus on those, useful for the user in the
actual context. Salber et. al. [13] define context as
Situative information that is part of an application’s
operating environment and can be sensed by the
application. This includes the location, identity,
activity and state of users and objects. Defining the
actual usefulness of services consequently brings the
need of context awareness [1, 15, 7, 10, 11].
The permanent increasing mobility of the users
and their devices leads to a frequently changing of
contexts. [18]. Being aware of continuously changing
context information allows the development of
context customized services, which can help to fit the
users actual requirements in specific situations and
minimize complexity in deciding for the best support
in the actual situation.
The main challenge on upcoming services will be
the users benefit especially regarding his comfort. In a
commercial environment, the users are overemployed
with the amount of service offers. In consideration of
device limitations, not the great many of offers will
achieve customer satisfaction. It must be possible to
filter the offered services as good as possible to the
users needs and transparent to the user
Miscellaneous dimensions of context are defined
[1, 9]. In this paper the location as a premier part of
context is addressed. Location based services meet
this requirements and seem to be the answer to the
„service overkill“.
Many of today’s location based services take
positioning information as input for the offered
services but do not depend on the users specific
location. Services like position specific weather
forecast or alert for allergic person need to be
available regardless of the actual position but with the
option to get location specific results. Other services
like agendas or advertisement can be bound stronger
to a position or area. The main point was the
localization as premiere action in each of those
services. Navigation services are the most common
application-area. The given services do not use the
potential of given technologies to limit the offers to
the actual, context specific needs of the customers.
The services for mobile devices usually start with
the notification of offered services from the service
provider. This notification needs to be the result of
context-customized service filtering. The consumption
of those services, their design and communication
capabilities will not be addressed this paper.

To map the provided services to the customer’s
requirements on services and capabilities of devices,
the amount of offered services need to be reduced to
those useful in the actual context. Filtering at the side
of the service receiver can do this reduction, but
mobile devices with their handicap on input- output
capabilities and computing resources are not suitable
for this. The primary liability for the suggested
restriction of reachable services lies at the service
providers side. This paper shows how disposal of the
infrastructure can be used to deliver restricted
services.
2. Location as context-information
Defining a location based service (LBS) as the
“retrieval of information directly related to the
location of the user at the time of making the
request“[5] focuses on the positioning information of
the user. Many of the actual services (especially
navigation services) fulfill the demand to be called a
LBS according this definition.
To create services with higher utility for users,
developers can benefit from a broader definition that
underlies the actual user questions: [8]
• Where am I?
• What can I do here?
• Who and what is near me?
These questions can be answered by the mapping
of various services to actual spatial locations. The
problem is that there might be a lot of actions users
can do in the specific location and usual there are
many people or objects around. Perceiving and
scanning the environment has to include other
parameters of context as well to collect the users
situation and needs as good as possible. Examples for
parameters to be sensored - aside from the location -
are the closeness of objects or other people and
environmental factors like temperature or humidity.
The need for sensor-information differs from one
service to another. The sum of sensor information can
help to render more precisely the users actual context
and consequently his needs and consequently answer
the question what the user wants to do here. To
minimize the decision-problem between accessible
services, the location-information can be enhanced by
a broader definition of context to determine the
potential requirements of the user. [1, 15]
The service provider must address the actual
requirements of the involved entities. The main
challenge in the development of context aware
services is the definition and filtering of offered
services to a useful amount from the customer and
service provider point of view. Context areas are a set
2
of parameters to define the actual situation with
potential needs of the user. Sensors and profile-
information affect those parameters. Sensoring the
location is the first step to build services customized
to the actual context and therefore the actual
requirements of the user. The location is one of the
easiest accessible parameters of context, which can be
used to minimize the amount of expected services. [2,
7, 14]
Other parameters like nearby objects or people
can also be scanned in a feasible way (e.g. the usage
of RFID tags). All of the used sensors help to
complete the view on the actual environment to
specify the users situation and therefore his needs and
requirements.
Various definitions [1, 9, 10] include the
following pieces of the environment:
• Computing environment available processors,
devices accessible for user input and display,
network capacity, connectivity, and costs of
computing
• User environment location, collection of nearby
people, and social situation
• Physical environment lighting and noise level
• Time context (time, season)
• Context history (context at t-1)
Specially sensor information about computing-
and user- environment can be classified in reachable
and non-reachable ones. This paper addresses just
reachable sensor-information as information about
actually reachable objects or services. They list the
ability to exploit situative environmental information
to deliver resources relevant to the user’s actual
context, the ability to execute a command
automatically based on the user’s context and the
ability to display relevant information to the user.
3. Notion of reachability
A main problem is that most of the actual
services called “location based” just use the actual
location as input querying specific information and
provide navigation in the actual area. The available
service landscape outgrows the user and leads to an
unmanageable state of handling.
Binding a service to a specific location or
geographical range can help to make it transparently
accessible for the user. In a business scenario this
binding also leads to stronger customer loyalty as a
benefit for the contractor. The provider knows the
active (personally reachable) set of his customers and
can attend to them with customized information out of
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his CRM-system. The combination of stored user

information and tracking systems needs to be handled
with care and only with full information for the user
concerning data security.
Location-bound-services extend the idea of LBS
and offer new opportunities. In LBS the service
deliver position-specific results. Changing the location
will lead to other results from the same service. With
the usage of location-bound-services different services
will be delivered when the actual position of the user
changes. A service does not need to be available from
a different location.
The provision of infrastructure can be seen as the
first step to a location bound service. An example
could be the scenario of various LAN access points Figure 1 Classification of services
which is mentioned in section 5. The access to a
wireless LAN access point is strictly limited to a The affiliation of a service to his class is defined
geographical range and so the services in this range by the implementation of the service. The awareness
are. It is possible to minimize the amount of delivered of this classification helps to specify the range of
services in control of the contractor. From this point offered services to a manageable limit. The logical or
of view the deliberately controlled availability of spatial constraints can be considered with hardware-
internal services (provided by the contractor) or or software based service restrictions.
looped through external services (internet-access,
knowledgebases,…) will become a serious factor in
the economic competition. 4. Reachability framework
Services needed in a context are not just those
bound to the actual location. Therefore it is necessary In this paper reachability is defined as the overlap
to differ various kinds of services and their of the position and trading area of the service to the
reachability: postition and trading area of the user. A typically
• Global services are needed in general. They are convinient trading area of a user is the set of locations
useful in many situations independent of the in walking distance. The physical range of a user or a
actual situation and environment of the user. services is limited by the hardware on the particular
Therefore they will not be filtered. (E.g. side. A spatial distance needs to be under-runned to
websearches, email access,...) reach the service.
• Context aware services (logical positioned
Services) need a restriction to users. They are just
interesting under certain circumstances and are
specialized to support users in their actual
scenario. (E.g. groupware, brokering services).
The logical restriction needs to be extended via
user profiling.
• Location bound services (physical positioned
services) take the physical presence of a user as Figure 2 Reachability of services
basic requirement. The reachability underlies
physical restrictions. (E.g. area restricted wireless The focus is on the overlap of physical ranges
intranets) and leads to services bound to locations. Logical
reachability can be defined as the logical overlap of
• Hybrid services describe the intersection area of user-needs to service-range and need to be handled in
context-aware and location-bound services. The context aware and user-profiling systems.
reachability of these services underlies logical
and physical restrictions. (E.g. customized menus 4.1 Location of user
in restaurants are just valid in a specific location
The limitation to the geographical context can be
area and can be customized with user-profile
done by any kind of positioning (e.g. locating via cell-
information logically)
phone operator, GPS, ...). This paper focuses on
services built for mobile devices as cell-phones,

smart-phones and PDAs. To provide the usual service
of voice calls the user with his mobile device needs to
be located via his nearest base-transceiver-station
(BTS) [12]. The necessary information about the
actual nearest BTS can also be used to provide the
cell-phone-user with positioning information. The
quality of this information depends strongly on the
concentration of BTSs and increases in congested
areas. The user can benefit from this circumstance by
using services (via communication enabling services
like SMS, WAP, WWW) that can handle positioning
information offered by the telecom-provider.
There are various possibilities to reach the
position of mobile devices, depending on the local
circumstances or the needs on localization precision.
One of the most transparent is the usage of the global
positioning system (GPS)[17]. GPS systems work only
in outdoor environments even if the location of the
user is changing rapidly and run to their limits in
tough territories (e.g. high buildings in congested
areas). Indoor infrared locators can be used (e.g.
PARCTab in[15]) or RFID tags can map a user to a
specific location [4].
4.2 Position of service
Wireless infrastructure itself provides physical
access-limitation by the accessible range of its access
points. The problem is that the range of wireless
access can’t be defined exactly and is influenced by
various factors (e.g. dead spots in consequence of high
buildings or other limitations by the constructional
environment).
Binding services hardware based to location
holds difficulties especially in transaction
management. Mobile devices potentially lead to a
strong movement between infrastructure areas.
Therefore a complete service transaction just within
one area of the infrastructure can’t be guaranteed [3].
Main problems are the control events for a service to
start and stop. The smooth movement between areas
requires a high level technological infrastructure.
4.3 Context of user
Profiling can be a way to context customized
personal service areas. Only the user himself has the
ability to define his actual context exactly. One
solution is a general preference profile for the
customer, which defines the provided services by
selection. Matching strategies can limit the offer to the
customers need as best as possible.
4.4 Mapping of context and services
The provision of services can be seen as an
mapping of real world economic environments to
virtual. The mechanisms of interpersonal tradeoff are
familiar to us. The porting of proofed service
4
exchange mechanisms to virtual communities stands
to reason.
The infrastructional approach can also be used in
smaller entities of service provisioning. Ad-hoc peer-
to-peer connections can be use to serve offers not only
from supplier to customer in a B2C scenario also from
person to person in C2C [6].
Ad-hoc provision raises the need of standardized
exchange of service information. Web-services and
the use of WSDL improve the mutual allocation of
services [20].
5. Scenario
One scenario for the usage of the proposed
approach could be in shopping malls. Each shop can
provide his services or products via his individual
accesspoint. The customers´ shopping carts are
equipped with wireless network-technology and
PDAs. The user who is nearby a shop can receive the
list of provided services or products via ad-hoc
network connection and can compare the list with his
actual requirements (profile) to take decisions.
The potential customer tries to connect to any
available accesspoint. If he reaches an accesspoint by
nature it is in walking distance. The provided services
can be inspected by the customer personally. If the
user would have internet-access via his mobile device
instead of a location-bound solution, he would get an
unmanageable amount of provided services or products
fitting his actual requirements. Most of the offered
services or products are out of reach for him, without
the possibility of personal inspection and with the
drawback of shipping-costs and delivery-time delay.
Even with the use of location-based services the
information provided to the user usually is affected by
a portal provider.
The supplier or service provider knows that if the
device of the potential customer is reachable, also the
customer is located in an area less than 100 meters
(indoor) and can be reached personally, with the effect
of better customer-support and without the mentioned
drawbacks on the providers side, like limited
opportunities of the portal provider..
The additional benefit in this scenario is the
relatively cheap infrastructure for such a system and a
maximum of control in the hand of direct participants.
Just the service provider and the potential customer
are involved, without the need of any external
infrastructure- or portal-provider and their effect on
the business-case.

6. Related work
This work is inspired by the ongoing research and
recent work on context aware ubiquitous computing
[1, 10, 13, 15, 16] and on location based services [2 ,3
,5].
In this work information about context is not
even location-information. The infrastructure
reachable in a specific area does not define the context
but offers also information about listed and available
services.
Wireless technology suitable in the mentioned
scenario mentioned in section 5 is available and
consolidated in [12]. Flexible ad-hoc communication
in mobile networks is a necessity of this approach and
already described by Doval et al in [6].
Ververidis et. al propose a system for location
based mobile marketing in [19]. Their work shows the
economic benefit of the idea. This paper extended the
given idea from simple advertising to service
provision.
7. Limitations and critics
Not addressed in this approach is the problem of
multiple contexts, the moving between them and the
intersection areas. On their journey from one context
to another the users often are part of a view context,
which is interesting to them.
The allocation to a context (location, time,
nearby objects, …) can be done by various sensors
and network infrastructure up to a limit. This can be
solved with the usage of context-variable sets [11] but
the final allocation to the current situation (as personal
preferences and requirements) have to be configured
by the user himself.
Sensors and connected positioning systems are
critical from the users point of view. Despite of the
benefits in service quality there are also privacy
problems to be handled carefully. The services and
their assortment have to overcome the users legitimate
fear to be observed.
The proposed ad-hoc connections require also a
standardization of service broadcasting to allow
client-side applications for personal decision support.
8. Conclusion and future work
To make the provisioning of services manageable
from the mentioned point of view, they need to be
classified based on of their reachability. The
dimensions of the classification are the logical
reachability and the geographical reachability.
5
Successive the definition of context spreads into
logical depending context and geographical depending
context. Both of them are needed to limit the available
services to a useful minimum.
For the development of a service it’s easier to
provide global services with no restrictions at all. The
limitation to a specific context can be solved by
hardware restrictions concerning the reachability of
the system. In our definition of logical context
limitation profile of the user is needed to separate
context areas.
Workarounds with logical context restrictions can
limit the amount of services presented to the user in a
“good” way. The logical accessibility of services can
either be restricted based on certain preferences or can
be modeled using various sensors.
Binding the user to a specific location can be
achieved by physical limitation of the access to the
service. Geographically itemized service maps can
emulate this physical limitation.
Today’s´ mobile services do not reach the
potential given by technology. The approach
presented in this paper is part of the vision of a
personal decision support system. The mentioned
concept of reachability should provide the future
system with communication and collaborative
facilities.
The goal is to keep the personal decision support
as independent as possible from infrastructional
networks and give control to the direct participants
with the effect of a shortened and more transparent
value-chain in m-commerce.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Prof. Gabriele Kotsis, Dr. Ismail
Khalil Ibrahim and Thomas Grill (university of Linz,
dept. of telecooperation) who supported me in this
work with enriching discussions and ideas.
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