Title: Using web services for presence-based application development

Authors: Rajesh Karunamurthy, Ferhat Khendek, Roch H. Glitho

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W., Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8, Canada. ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W., Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8, Canada. ' Ericsson Canada Inc., 8400 Decarie Blvd., Montreal, QC, H4P 2N2, Canada

Abstract: Presence technology conveys the willingness and ability of an entity to communicate, and is very useful in developing innovative applications such as instant messaging and presence enabled conferencing or gaming. Standardisation efforts are ongoing in the protocol area, and also in developing APIs and Web Services (WS) for presence application development. In this paper, we critically evaluate these different approaches. WSs are found to be the best candidate for presence application development. However, the state-of-the-art presence WSs have several pitfalls. This paper proposes a novel, presence protocol independent WS that addresses the identified drawbacks. Two case studies, a presence enabled conferencing application and a presence enabled gaming application are provided to illustrate the use of the proposed WS. We have implemented the WS as a gateway towards an IETF SIMPLE based presence server, but other implementations are also possible. The mapping is discussed, the prototype described, and performance measurements are performed and analysed.

Keywords: presence applications; web services; SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions; SIMPLE; value-added services; case studies.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWGS.2006.010806

International Journal of Web and Grid Services, 2006 Vol.2 No.2, pp.167 - 197

Published online: 04 Sep 2006 *

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