Self-Configuring User-Centric Communication Services

The functionality of communication applications, such as instant messaging, has dramatically improved due to market competition. The quest for the competitive edge has resulted in the development of open platform APIs that allow communication applications to become building blocks, or communication frameworks for more elaborate communication applications. The services available through these different communication frameworks can however be quite dissimilar, as revealed from a survey of some of these frameworks. In this paper we propose an architecture that utilizes multiple communication frameworks and the autonomic computing capability of self-configuration of these frameworks. This architecture extends network communication broker (NCB) which is the layer of the communication virtual machine (CVM) that interacts with the underlying communication networks. We provide a detailed design of the proposed architecture and show how a communication scenario can be realized using a prototype of the NCB.