Terminating Telephony Services on the Internet
Authors: V. K. Gurbani, X.-H. Sun
Date: January, 2004
Venue: ACM/IEEE Trans. on Networking, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 571-581
Type: Journal
Abstract
We propose a general purpose service architecture for realizing services which start in the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) but terminate and execute on the Internet. We discuss the needs for such services, our early research efforts in this direction which lead to prototyping certain benchmark ser- vices, and the current state of work in this area. We demonstrate the feasibility of the architecture by focusing on services which in- volve wireline PSTN as well as the wireless aspects (2 G, 2.5 G) of the PSTN. Our methodology is attractive since it keeps each of the domains (PSTN and Internet) unaware as to where the service is executing with respect to which domain actually requested the ser- vice. Individual entities participating in the service do not have any knowledge that external entities from another domain also con- tributed in the execution and fulfillment of such services. Our ap- proach, as embodied in the service architecture, is to leverage the best of the Internet protocols (SIP, XML, HTTP) and technologies (instant messaging, presence) to provide a general framework for personalized service specification and execution.