mPub: A mobile presence aggregation framework

Presence systems are widely used today to get information of user availability and their willingness to communicate. As presence and Unified Communications (UC) services are viewed as productivity enhancements within enterprises, the need to connect these services across enterprise WANs and MANs becomes more important. Adding to the availability to communicate is the growing use of mobile devices in the workforce. This paper investigates a protocol that can be efficiently supported across mobile networks and between domains of enterprises. Specifically, we propose a compact presence vocabulary that uses HTTP and SMS protocols to publish to a presence server in the network. The proposed architecture extends the current standardization efforts in OMA PAL working group for non-SIP enabled mobiles. We present a reference implementation of the middleware server and the mobile publisher and show by experiments that our compact protocol is bandwidth (38% to 89%) and energy efficient.