This project is conducting a preliminary investigation in the design of collaborative wide-area wireless services facilitated through incentives. Unlike the existing service model in wide-area wireless environments where service interactions are negotiated with a single provider for a relatively long timescale, this research examines a flexible service model where service interactions are negotiated on-demand with multiple providers at arbitrary timescales. The ongoing work is the first step towards this new service model which decouples infrastructure providers from service providers, enables fine-grained competition, and promotes flexible composition of such services based on user and application needs. The research questions being pursued in this first steps are two-fold: (i) accounting, service validation and trust management to efficiently implement collaborative services, and (ii) design and implementation of a middleware that allows flexible interactions between the mobile devices and third-party services. The focus of the project is experimental with an objective to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach in realistic scenarios. The expected results of this project will be a prototype-based demonstration of the feasibility of the new service model. The work will be disseminated through publications in conferences and journals, public distribution of software and accompanying documentation, and can potentially be used as a seed for realistic deployments of in the future.
