A distributed architecture to support infomobility services

The growing popularity of mobile and location aware devices allows the deployment of infomobility systems that provide access to information and services for the support of user mobility. Current systems for infomobility services assume that most information is already available on the mobile device and the device connectivity is used for receiving critical messages from a central server. However, we argue that the next generation of infomobility services will be characterized by collaboration and interaction among the users, provided through real-time bidirectional communication between the client devices and the infomobility system.In this paper we propose an innovative architecture to support next generation infomobility services providing interaction and collaboration among the mobile users that can travel by several different transportation means, ranging from cars to trains to foot. We discuss the design issues of the architecture, with particular emphasis on scalability, availability and user data privacy, which are critical in a collaborative infomobility scenario. Copyright 2006 ACM.