Socio-Technical Awareness to Support Recommendation and Efficient Delivery of IMS-Enabled Mobile Services

The ever-increasing people demand for mobile communications has widely been satisfied by novel socially-enabled services and communication styles, starting from the advent of instant messaging to Voice over IP (VoIP), from Web 2.0 to social networks, and beyond. Most people agree that now the new challenge is to explore the potential of that immense information and service deposit already collected, ever-increasing, and easy-to-access to promote a socially-aware recommendation and to foster a more efficient delivery of mobile services. The article addresses the above issues, still unexplored in literature, by focusing on integration problems and describing a practical design experience derived from the development of a socio-technical aware support for the management of mobile services based on the widely diffused and interoperable IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) session control platform. Our proposal is organized along three main original technical guidelines: an innovative support to monitor and describe via social, physical, and computation information the sociotechnical context where services and user interact; a recommendation system to automate and facilitate dynamic selection of the mobile services most suitable from both final user and operator perspectives; and a new IMS-based management platform to ease the composition of existing IMS mobile services and the monitoring and control of their usage at runtime. We believe that we contribute with a first step to the understanding of how full awareness of socio and technical information allows improving overall Quality of Experience (QoE) for the final users.