Provisioning Context-Aware Advertisements to Wireless Mobile Users

Mobile advertising, which is an area of mobile commerce, is a form of advertising that targets users of handheld wireless devices such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). Given the constraints of such devices, mobile advertisements should be context-aware in the sense that the behaviour of such value-added services is mostly driven by information based on user's location, time, user preferences, and the task at hand. This paper presents the design and prototyping of a system for provisioning context-aware advertisements to wireless mobile users. We use mobile agents because such autonomous entities have characteristics that can benefit mobile devices and the wireless environment. We have constructed a proof of concept implementation using Java technologies with support for WAP-enabled and J2ME-enabled devices