Universal Inbox: Personal Mobility and Service Mobility in an Integrated Network Bhaskaran Raman ICEBERG, EECS, U.C.Berkeley Home Phone Voice Mail Pager Cell Phone Office Phone Calls during business hours Calls in the evening Anonymous Calls Friends & family calls Important headers access via phone

Design Decisions / Lessons Learned Monday 21 August : :35 Top-level design decisions Rationale for IP-based approach Why an infrastructure based approach? Leveraging cluster-computing environments: Ninja vSpace 10: :00 Design of the ICEBERG components and capabilities Signaling protocol for flexible multi-party communication Service creation model Clearing House for resource reservation 13: :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 devicesCommunication services

Universal Inbox: What is it? Policy-based Location-based Activity-based Speech-to-Text Speech-to-Voice Attached- Call-to-Pager/ Notification -to-Speech All compositions of the above! Universal Inbox Universal Inbox: Metaphor for personalized, integrated communication One of the first applications to drive the design of ICEBERG User 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 UID: Naming Service 1 1 hohltb: Prefers Desktop Preference Registry MediaManager Mail Access Service Illustrating Extensibility

800-MEDIA-MGR UID: mediamgr: Cluster locn. Bhaskar’s Cell-Phone Barbara’s Desktop Naming Service Preference Registry Automatic Path Creation Service MediaManager Mail Access Service 3 3 Bhaskar’s PSTN Phone

UID: hohltb: Prefers Desktop Bhaskar’s Cell-Phone Bhaskar’s PSTN Phone Barbara’s Desktop Naming Service Preference Registry Automatic Path Creation Service 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 IP-Addrs Tel. No:s -addrs Pager 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 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 Inbox Step-wise addition of eight different devices and services to the system Each 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 APCPersonal/Service mobility features 1Cell-Phones (#1) & Voice-over-IP (#2) (none)Call redirection/screening based on time-of-day & caller-id 2(+)Voic (#3)(none)Call redirection to voic also possible, Voic 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) redirection to cell- phone/VoIP/Voic 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 APCPersonal/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, 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 1/4 th 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