Universal Inbox: Personal Mobility

and Service Mobility in an

Integrated Network

Bhaskaran RamanICEBERG,

EECS, U.C.Berkeley

Home Phone

Voice MailPager

Cell Phone Office Phone

Calls during business hours

Calls in theevening

AnonymousCalls

Friends & family calls

E-MailImportant

e-mail headers

E-mail accessvia phone

Design Decisions / Lessons LearnedMonday 21 August 2000 10:15 - 10:35 Top-level design decisions Rationale for IP-based approach Why an infrastructure based approach? Leveraging cluster-computing environments: Ninja vSpace 10:35 - 12:00 Design of the ICEBERG components and capabilities Signaling protocol for flexible multi-party communication Service creation model Clearing House for resource reservation13:00 - 15:00 Design of the ICEBERG components and capabilities Automatic Path Creation service Naming service Preference Registry and Preference Manager Personal Activity Coordinator Universal Inbox for personal mobility and service mobility

Outline• Aug 21, 2000, Monday

– “Universal Inbox” set of capabilities– Goals and how they are achieved in ICEBERG– Extensibility and Scalability properties illustrated

• Aug 22, 2000, Tuesday– Details of redirection mechanism– Example of extension to the Universal Inbox

• Access to the Jukebox Service– APIs for extension

• Programmer’s perspective• Service provider’s perspective

– Details of scaling measurements

Motivating

Scenario

Problem Statement

• Requirement– Service integration and personalization

• Goals– Any-to-any capability– Extensibility: ease of adding new end-points– Scalability: global scale operation– Personal mobility and Service mobility

Communication devices Communication services

Universal Inbox: What is it?

Policy-basedLocation-basedActivity-based

Speech-to-TextSpeech-to-Voice Attached-EmailCall-to-Pager/Email Notification

Email-to-SpeechAll compositions

of the above!

Universal Inbox

Universal Inbox: Metaphor for personalized, integrated communication

One of the first applications to drive the design of ICEBERGUser sees unified, conceptual inbox of incoming communication

Design Principles

• Separation of functionality– Separation independent and reusable components– Reuse easy extensibility– Shared network services Economy of scale

• Network and device independence– Needed for extensibility to new devices

• Push control towards callee– In current communication networks, caller has

control– Callee needs to have control for flexible handling of

incoming communication

Use of ICEBERG Components

• Infrastructure components for network integration– Components in the Internet: open model, can leverage

proxy and cluster architectures (Ninja)• Identification and separation of components

– Name Mapping Service (NMS)– Automatic Path Creation service (APC)– Preference Registry (PR)– ICEBERG Access Points (IAP) to proxy for communication

end-points• Advantages of core infrastructure components

– Reusable pieces; Extensibility is easier: just add to the piece that requires extension

Use of ICEBERG Components (Continued)

• Automatic Path Creation (APC) service– Generic any-to-any data transformation– Provides data-type independence

• Preference registry– Mechanism for ubiquitous redirection– Achieves the “control to callee” design principle

• Naming service– Mapping between different device identities– Provides device name independence

• ICEBERG Access Points (IAPs)– Provide network independence

Bhaskar’s Cell-Phone

Barbara’s Desktop

Automatic Path Creation Service

510-642-8248 UID: hohltb@cs.berkeley.edu

Naming Service

1hohltb: Prefers Desktop

Preference Registry2

3

MediaManager Mail Access Service

Illustrating Extensibility

800-MEDIA-MGR UID: mediamgr@cs.berkeley.edu

mediamgr: Cluster locn.

Bhaskar’s Cell-Phone

Barbara’s Desktop

Naming Service

Preference Registry

Automatic Path Creation Service

1 2

MediaManager Mail Access Service

3

Bhaskar’s PSTN Phone

510-642-8248 UID: hohltb@cs.berkeley.edu

hohltb: Prefers Desktop

Bhaskar’s Cell-Phone

Bhaskar’s PSTN Phone

Barbara’s Desktop

Naming Service

Preference Registry

Automatic Path Creation Service

1

23

MediaManager Mail Access Service

Extensibility• Name-space

– Hierarchical– New name-spaces added

by creating a new sub-tree at root

• Automatic Path Creation service– Operators can be plugged

in– Old operators are

reusable• Set of IAPs

– New IAPs can be added independent of existing ones

– All old IAPs are reachable from the new one

IAP

IAP

IAP

IAP

IP-Addrs

Tel. No:s

Email-addrsPager no:s

Leveraging Extensibility in the APC

This extensibility translates to ease of end-point addition in the Universal Inbox

Speech synthesizer

Plain text

PCM encoder

PCM audio

HTML Email

HTML text extractor

GSM audio

GSM encoder

Implementation Experience

• Extensibility– Universal Inbox set of features extended to lot of

device and service end-points• Scalability

– Components tested for latency and scaling bottlenecks

Extensions to the Universal

InboxStep-wise addition of eight different

devices and services to the

systemEach step involves addition of an IAP –

for the device/network or

the service

Each step integrates the device/service with ALL existing

ones

Extensions to the Universal Inbox

Device/Service AP

Operators in APC Personal/Service mobility features

1 Cell-Phones (#1) & Voice-over-IP (#2)

(none) Call redirection/screening based on time-of-day &

caller-id2 (+

)Voice-mail

(#3)(none) Call redirection to voice-

mail also possible, Voice-mail access from cell-phone/VoIP end-points

3 (+)

Mail-push-client (#4)

Op1 (text to sun-audio)

Op2 (sun-audio to PCM)

Op3 (PCM to GSM)

Email redirection to cell-phone/VoIP/Voice-mail

4 (+)

Instant-message-client

(#5)

(none) Instant message redirection to

cell-phone/VoIP/Voice-mail

Extensions to the Universal Inbox

Device/Service AP

Operators in APC Personal/Service mobility features

5 (+)

Jukebox-service (#6)

Op4 (MPEG3 to PCM) Jukebox access from cell-phone/VoIP

6 (+)

MediaManager Service (#7)

(none) MediaManager access from cell-phone/VoIP

7 (+)

PSTN end-points (#8)

Op5 (G.723 to PCM)Op6 (PCM to G.723)Op7 (GSM to PCM)

Call redirection to PSTN, E-mail redirection to

PSTN, Instant-message redirection to PSTN,

Jukebox and MediaManager access

from PSTN

and necessary operators

of ICEBERG access-point

Incremental addition

results in incremental addition of

functionality

Implementation Experience with Extension

• Examples of extension:– IAP for Ninja Jukebox

• Allow service access from voice-enabled end-points• ~ 700 lines of Java• Also required addition of operators to APC service:

MPEG-3 to PCM– IAP for MediaManager

• Allow access to the MediaManager service• Similar code-size and effort• No other component had to be touched

– Operators for G.723• Getting codec to work required effort• But, adding to APC was ~ two hours of work ( simple

API for adding operators)

Lessons learned: What was easy?

• Extension to include a new communication service or device– Build an IAP– Add appropriate operators

Effort involved in building a service is independent of the number of networks it is

made available on

Scalability Analysis

• Shared infrastructure components scaling and provisioning concerns

• Would like to– Answer provisioning questions– Identify scaling bottlenecks

• Three shared core components are:– APC– Preference Registry– Naming service

Scalability Analysis: APC

• One round of performance optimization– Originally, operators were unix processes and one

would run for each path– Now, operators can be shared across paths

• Performance for the following operators– Null (copies input to output),– Toast (PCM to GSM), Untoast (GSM to PCM), and– G.723 encoder, decoder

• Path creation latency and throughput measured as a function of increasing load

• 500MHz Pentium-III 2-way multiprocessor running Linux-2.2 with IBM’s JDK 1.1.8

Path Creation:Latency vs. Load

Toast Operator

Untoast Operator

About 50ms latency for path creation

Path Creation:Throughput vs.

Load

Toast Operator

Untoast Operator

About 7.2 path creations/sec at a load

of 64 simultaneous paths

Calculation of Scaling

• On average– 2.8 calls/hour/user– Average duration of calls (path) is 2.6 minutes

• Using these– 571 users can be supported by a two-node APC

service– Encouraging since the telephone network uses

expensive hardware equipment for these transformations (TRAU at the Inter-Working Function)

• About 1/4th of this for G.723 decoder• G.723 encoder: heavy-weight

Scalability Analysis: Preference Registry

• Uses cluster-based distributed storage for storing preference profiles

• Throughput: 55.3 requests/sec (for dummy user preference profiles)

• This means about 71,100 users for a single preference registry

• Clearly not a scaling bottleneck

Additions to call-setup latency

• Universal Inbox’s redirection mechanisms cause extra delay

• Preference registry lookup– About 35ms

• Path creation at APC– About 50ms

• Such latencies may be high for regular call setup– Need to be brought down in the next round of

implementation

Related Work: State-of-the-Art• Commercial services

– Concentrate on functionality– No any-to-any capability

• Research projects– Mobile People Architecture: Personal Proxies– Telephony Over Packet networkS– UMTS

• Issues not addressed:– Infrastructure support for network integration– Extensibility– Scalability– Personal mobility + Service mobility

Further Plans

• Extend to PCM end-points– PSTN phones, via H.323 gateway– Build IAP for interfacing– Hypothesis: all existing end-points and services

should interoperate without modification (e.g., Jukebox, MediaManager, Two way call with Cell-Phone, VoIP, etc.)

• Inside department deployment– Make system more usable– Extend to more services and end-points– Scaling and latency issues

• Services on vSpace– Leverage cluster-computing features

Summary

• Universal Inbox: metaphor for any-to-any communication and service access

• Personal mobility– redirection by preference registry

• Service mobility– result of the any-to-any capability

• Architecture viable for global operation– IAPs can be developed and deployed by independent

service providers• Extensibility

– Made easy by the separation and reuse of functionality• Open Questions

– Security issues– Billing issues