Presence is one of the central enablers of converged communication services and is utilized in a variety of Web-based content provider (e.g., Google TalkTM, Yahoo! Messenger TMor SkypeTM), enterprise (e.g., IBM SametimeTM) and service provider/telco (e.g., Push-to-talk) applications. While initially popularized as a means for disseminating “online status” in instant messaging systems, presence can embody “context” as diverse as user location, user preferences, device battery levels and attendee details in a conference call. Consequently, presence-based applications are beginning to cover a much richer spectrum – ranging from location tracking, to real-time discovery of available experts for collaboration, to business process-enablement. Both services providers (e.g. device status, subscriber location) and enterprises (e.g. free/busy, expertise, availability) are rich sources of presence.
Today, presence-based applications consume presence information from the underlying infrastructure consisting of Presence Servers – using protocols like SIP, XMPP. Services and applications perform their own custom logic on consumed “real-time” data, depending on their requirement. The underlying presence infrastructure primarily performs the task of the “real-time data supplier”. There is minimal support for programmability of the underlying infrastructure by the information consumers (services and applications). Moreover, increasing load of applications consuming presence has implications on the scalability of the infrastructure.
We are working on three key aspects: How do we scale such federated presence systems? How do we provide a model for meaningful aggregation/integration of information from multiple presence systems? And finally, how do we exploit presence using such a federated, scalable system to provide a better interaction between applications and their users across domains?
This project has support from multiple product divisions - Global Technology Services, Software group (Datapower, Presence Server), Server group (Bladecenter Telco) and Internet Security Systems and is a six-person research effort between Watson and IBM India Research Labs starting Dec 1, 2007.
Representative Publication
A. Acharya, N. Banerjee, D. Chakraborty, K. Dasgupta, A. Misra, S. Sharma, X. Wang, C. Wright,
Programmable Presence Virtualization for Next-Generation Context-based Applications,
In Proc. 7th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom), March, 2009.
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