Beacon network

#The present invention relates to mobile communications devices, such as telephones and suitably equipped personal digital assistants (PDA's), and to infrastructure systems and protocols for use with the same.

#Recent years have seen a great increase in subscribers world-wide to mobile telephone networks. Through advances in technology and the addition of functionalities, cellular telephones have become personal, trusted devices. In addition, advances in wireless networking technology now allow handheld computing devices to wirelessly communicate with networked resources. A result of this is that a mobile information society is developing, with personalised and localised services becoming increasingly more important. Such “Context-Aware” (CA) terminals such as mobile telephones, PDA's and other wireless devices, are used with low power, short range base stations in places like shopping malls to provide location-specific information. This information might include local maps, information on nearby shops and restaurants and so on. The user's CA terminal may be equipped to filter the information received according to pre-stored user preferences and the user is only alerted if an item of data of particular interest has been received.

#Commonly-assigned International patent application EP 01/06948 filed with a priority date of Aug. 15, 2000 and unpublished at the priority date of the present invention, describes a CA terminal and puts forward the concept of broadcasting data before a connection is made according to BlueTooth protocols. It exploits the BlueTooth Inquiry phase by extending the very short ID packet sent out during this mode and using the extra space thus gained to carry a small amount of information. This information can be BlueTooth system related data or one-way application data. This scheme has the potentially useful feature of being backwards-compatible with legacy BlueTooth devices that are not able to understand this extra field.

#An example of the present invention will now be described in detail with reference to the accompanying Figures, in which:

#FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram of a beacon network illustrating one embodiment of the present invention; and,

#FIGS. 2 and 3 illustrate possible data supply source configurations; and,

#The measures proposed are illustrated by reference to WAP and WML, but are relevant to any IP-based or similar browsing protocol (e.g. iMode, WAP, HTML/HTTP, etc). One or more subsets of main WAP WML content is delivered over a short-range RF or IR link (in a single initial data burst or broadcast, or through a number of short-range beacon/handset exchanges) in preference to sourcing that content over a wide-area network. In one embodiment, a part of the total WML or other content is mirrored in the beacon's cache (or on a server behind the beacon).

#FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram of a beacon network illustrating one embodiment of the present invention. A beacon 10 hosts a cache 20 of data. The beacon 10 operates in a BlueTooth pico-network. The broadcast area of the beacon 10 within the pico-network is illustrated as the area 40. A BlueTooth-enabled mobile device 30, such as a CA terminal in the form of a mobile telephone, PDA or other device within the beacon's 10 broadcast area 40 is able to communicate with the beacon 10 and obtain data via the BlueTooth pico-network from the cache 20. Data within the cache 20 is a subset of data available to the mobile device 30. The beacon 10 can connect to a data network 50 via a network connection 60. The available data, of which the data in the cache 20 is a subset, is held in one or more memory 70 that can be accessed via the data network 50. Whilst the memory 70 is illustrated as a single entity in FIG. 1, it will be apparent to the reader that the data can be stored in a number of memories accessible from the data network 50. Such memories could be hard disks of computers, online storage memories or other data storage media or services. Furthermore, the data network 50 could be one or more Intranets and/or the Internet. Additionally, the memory or memories could be websites or other web based resources.

#The mobile device 30 is able to connect directly to the data network 50 via a portal 80. The data connection 90 between the mobile device 30 and the portal 80 may, for example, be a WAP data connection.