Exploiting access control information in user profiles to reconfigure user equipment

Reconfigurable radio systems allow user terminals to access different communication technologies, without duplication of hardware. To this end, terminals need appropriate software (SW) modules, which, in advanced scenarios, can be downloaded on demand from the network. The network element that provides these modules to the terminals may need to know information about the terminal/user, in order to better adapt the SW modules to user needs and terminal capabilities and to grant only requests coming from authorized users. For this reason, such network element needs to access user profile information. In this paper, we propose a distributed approach to retrieve users profile information that does not require the mandatory presence of a public network operator. The goal of this mechanism is to allow a suitably appointed entity to retrieve all the needed information, related to the user/terminal, from a suitable location/server in the network, given some information provided by the terminal itself. Our approach is based on the "Dataweb" paradigm, under standardization in the Oasis consortium