2010 Volume 5 Issue 1 Pages 231-242
The development of wireless technologies, cellular networks, WiFi, and Bluetooth has created heterogeneous network environments. In these environments, users can access anything at anytime, anywhere using these wireless technologies; however, in order to make full use of such wireless networks, users need to discover whether or not wireless networks exist in their vicinity and select the most appropriate one. Then, users have to obtain and input parameter settings for the wireless networks to begin communication. In this paper, we propose a network composition framework that enables automatic connections to a wireless network suitable for the user's context with minimal interaction. Based on this framework, we introduce network composition procedures which realize network discovery, network selection, configuration information notification, and device configuration with the support of a cellular network connection. We implement the proposed framework and procedures in a real environment comprised of cellular phones and laptop PCs. We examine implemented functions and their performance using this experimental implementation and present several attractive examples of actual use.