Masters student: Sun Tao, 2005

Supervisor: Bill Tucker

Project link

Research question

This project examines the challenge of providing aspects of carrier-grade reliability to a multi-modal semi-synchronous Internet Protocol-based communication platform. We focus specifically on service provision and life cycle management of the adaptation services within our platform. This platform supports multiple modalities, e.g. text, voice and video, and converts between the modalities in both real-time and asynchronous modes. We call such a conversion adaptation, e.g. text to speech. The platform provides the communication infrastructure, encapsulating the modality adaptation as a managed service. The goal of this project is to examine the efficacy of integrating our bridging platform with a JAIN SLEE (Service Logic Execution Environment) in order to achieve the desired reliability aspects.

Related work

This project is based on a multi-modal messaging platform prototype originally developed at UCT [1]. In order to incorporate the JAIN SLEE, the prototype has been ported to Java and integrated with a NIST-based SIP and SIMPLE environment. The JAIN reference implementation comes from Open Cloud, a product called Rhino (www.opencloud.com). Similar Application Server (AS) work is also being done with IBM’s WebSphere for Telecom, but that effort is more e-business orientated. This project’s focus is on attempting to bring the reliability inherent in an SLEE to the semi-synchronous adaptation services in our IP-based communication platform.

Research methodology

The project addresses the design, development and measurement of an IP-based communication platform within the context of carrier grade reliability. The methodology of the design and development is a classical iterative approach to software prototyping. The measurement methodology involves the design of a laboratory-based quantitative experiment to load versions of the platform with and without the JAIN SLEE, in various stress tests of the call handling capabilities for the adaptation services.

Expected outputs

There will be several research outputs: knowledge gained, software artefacts and academic publications. We expect to be able to suggest that the JAIN SLEE approach is a worthwhile manner in which to provide some degree of carrier-grade reliability to an IP-based communication platform. This project will also produce a useable IP-based communication platform with an API for application development. As mentioned above, the underlying components are based on standards such as SIP, SIMPLE and the JAIN SLEE. This project’s Work in Progress paper was recently accepted at SATNAC 2004 [2] and will be submitted as a full paper for SATNAC 2005 in addition to at least one international conference and/or journal.

References

[1] John Lewis, William Tucker and Edwin Blake, "SoftBridge: A Multimodal Instant Messaging Bridging System", Proceedings of the 6th South African Telecommunications Networks & Applications Conference, SATNAC 2003, George, South Africa.

[2] Tao Sun and William D. Tucker. "A SoftBridge with Carrier Grade Reliability Using JAIN SLEE", Proceedings of the 7th South African Telecommunications Networks & Applications Conference, SATNAC 2004, Stellenbosch, South Africa.

[3] Edwin H. Blake and William D. Tucker. "Bridging Communications Across the Digital Divide", CTIT Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Social Intelligence Design, SID 2004, Enschede, The Netherlands, pp. 29-38. Eds. Anton Nijholt and Toyoaki Nashida, ISSN 0929-0672, ISBN 90-75296-6.