Pervasive and interactive use of multimedia contents via multi-technology location-aware wireless architectures

Nowadays, due to the increasing demands of the fast-growing Consumer Electronics (CEs) market, more powerful mobile consumer devices are being introduced continuously; thanks to this evolution of CEs technologies, many sophisticated pervasive applications start to be developed and applied to context and location aware scenarios. This chapter explores applications and a real world case-study of pervasive computing by means of a flexible communication architecture well suited for the interactive enjoyment of historical and artistic contents and built on top of a wireless network infrastructure. The designed system and the implemented low cost testbed integrate different communication technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS with the aim of offering, in a transparent and reliable way, a mixed set of different multimedia and Augmented Reality (AR) contents to mobile users equipped with handheld devices. This communication architecture represents a first solid step to provide network support to pervasive context-aware applications pushing the ubiquitous computing paradigm into reality.