Universal In-Box

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Universal In-Box

• Bhaskaran Raman
• Iceberg, EECS
• ISRG Retreat, Jan 2000

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Outline

• Universal In-box What is it?
• Application requirements
• How to satisfy the requirements?
• Implementation status
• Lessons learnt
• Summary, open questions

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Universal In-box What is it?
Integration
Speech-to-Text Speech-to-Voice Attached-Email Call
-to-Pager/Email Notification Email-to-Speech All
compositions of the above!
Policy-based Location-based Activity-based
Personalization
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Universal In-box What is it?

• One of the first Iceberg applications
• Wide range of requirements
• Canonical hybrid service
• Related efforts
• commercial products
• PCS efforts UMTS, IMT2000, UPT
• MPA (Stanford), TOPS (ATT)

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Application Requirements (Goals)

• Extend to new networks
• Different generations of PCS networks
• Micro-cellular networks
• Pico-cellular (BlueTooth Scatternets)
• Extend to new devices
• CDMA phones, 2-way pagers, Palm VII, Visor
• Device of the future

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Application Requirements (Goals)

• Accommodate new data formats
• new codecs
• better speech recognition/generation
• Personalization
• very important

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Application Requirements (Goals)
Personalization is crucial
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Application Requirements (Goals)

• Further requirements
• Scaling to a large user-base
• Working in the wide-area
• Resilient to failures
• Security and privacy

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Outline

• Universal In-box What is it?
• Application requirements
• How to satisfy the requirements?
• Implementation status
• Lessons learnt
• Summary, open questions

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Meeting the Requirements

• Design principles
• Network independence
• Device independence
• Pushing control to the callee
• Leverage Ninja Service platform
• for service availability and fault-tolerance

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Iceberg Components
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Meeting the Requirements

• Network Independence
• Provided by IAP
• Addition of a new n/w
• Develop a new IAP
• And deploy multiple IAPs
• Device Independence
• Device name independence
• Device type independence

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Meeting the Requirements

• Name independence
• use any end-point id
• hierarchical, distributed naming service
• level of indirection, for wide-area operation
• Data-Type independence
• APC Service
• Ninja paths (operators connectors)
• Adding data formats is as simple as writing the
  relevant operators

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Meeting the Requirements

• Personalization
• Preference profiles
• scripts
• GUI for generating profiles
• Preference-Registry
• storing and processing profiles
• PAC for dynamic inputs
• Preference-Registry a service in a Ninja-Base

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Meeting the Requirements
Preference Manager
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What has been implemented?

• IAPs
• for GSM testbed, VAT, Voice-Mail service,
  Instant-Messaging (Sanctio)
• APC Service (Emre/Barbara, Morley)
• Naming Service LDAP
• Preference Registry iSpace service
• Preference Manager GUI (Rahul)
• Personal Activity Coordinator (PAC) - Xia

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Lessons learnt What was easy?

• Extension to include a new communication service
  (Sanctio)
• Built IAP (proxy) to interface Sanctio end-points
  to Iceberg
• Making the service available at all end-points
  after the extension
• Cell-Phone, VAT, Potentially POTS-Phone

Effort involved in building a service is
independent of the number of networks it is made
available on
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Lessons learnt Why it was easy?

• What gave the flexibility?
• Separation of concerns network, device-name and
  device-type independence
• Deployment flexibility - anyone can deploy an IAP
• IAP can interface to a network or a generic
  service end-point
• Modeling components as services

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Lessons learnt What was hard?

• Getting the interfaces right
• still may not be generic enough
• can the pref-reg interface support other
  services?
• Scaling measurements
• Client problems
• socket problems, client saturation, RMI too slow
• Server problems
• RMI too slow, JVM bugs, (thread) scheduling
  problems

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Summary

• Key idea Infrastructure components for
  network/device independence, personalization
• Important to get interfaces right
• Good experience in building and extending a
  hybrid service

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What next?

• Interface to new APC service
• Interface to PAC
• Implement security mechanisms
• Usability of Preference-Manager

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Further Open Questions

• Interfaces and Components
• What is a flexible interface between the Pref-Reg
  and the PAC?
• Other middleware components for other services?
• Testing platform for testing scalability,
  fault-tolerance, etc.
• Handling feature interactions
• Your question goes here