Presence Traffic Optimization Techniques

With the growth of presence-based services, it is important to provision the network to support high traffic and load generated by presence services. Presence event distribution systems amplify a single incoming PUBLISH message into possibly numerous outgoing NOTIFY messages from the server. This can increase the network load on inter-domain links and can potentially disrupt other QoS-sensitive applications. In this document, we present existing as well as new techniques that can be used to reduce presence traffic both in inter-domain and intra-domain scenarios. Specifically, we propose two new techniques: sending common NOTIFY for multiple watchers and batched notifications. We also propose some generic heuristics that can be used to reduce network traffic due to presence

A Microservice based Architecture for a Presence Service in the Cloud

Presence service enables sharing of, and a subscription to the end users presence (online or offline) status. Primarily used for instant messaging applications, the presence service now finds its way into innovative solutions for domains such as wireless sensor networks and Internet of Things. The growth in users of instant messaging applications is ever increasing since the advent of social media networks. Presence service needs to be highly scalable to handle growing load of the users. Moreover, the user activity is inherently dynamic in nature which requires the presence service to be highly elastic to utilise resources efficiently. Traditional presence services are built as monoliths. Monolithic architectures by design are difficult to scale, lacks elasticity and are resource inefficient. Moreover, overprovisioning of resources to handle unanticipated loads further adds to resource inefficiency. Cloud computing and microservices are emerging paradigms that can help tackling the challenges above. Cloud computing with three key facets: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) enable rapid provisioning and release of resources (e.g. storage, compute, network) on demand. Microservices is an approach of developing applications as a set of smaller, independent, and individually scalable services which communicate with each other using lightweight protocols. The on-demand nature of cloud computing provides a platform to achieve elastic scalability whereas microservices increase the scalability of the architecture. This thesis presents a microservice architecture for a presence service in the cloud. The architecture is based on a state of the art business model. The proposed architecture has three main components: A stateless front-end, a repository and a cache. The front end is built as a set of microservices exposed as SaaS. The front end, to remain technology agnostic, communicates with the repository using the Representational State Transfer (REST) interface. The cache provides fast data access to the front end. The front end microservices use message queues to communicate with each other. Besides, to check the feasibility of the architecture, a proof of concept prototype is implemented for a Session Initiation Protocol for Instant Messaging and Presence (SIMPLE) based presence service. Performance measurements have been made for the proposed and traditional architectures. Also, a comparative analysis of the results is done. The analysis of the results shows that the proposed architecture provides the desired scalability and elasticity to the presence service. Moreover, the proposed architecture provides lower response time and higher throughput in comparison to the traditional architecture

A service-enabling framework for the session initiation protocol (SIP)

In this dissertation, we propose a framework to provide multimedia communication services. Our proposed framework is based on SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and has four fundamental properties: it is available, secure, high performing, and oriented to innovations. The framework is not an architecture with a rigid structure. Instead, the framework is a toolkit made up of a set of tools that can be combined in different ways. The combination of these tools provides applications and services with functionality needed to implement a wide variety of multimedia communication services. Applications and services built on top of the framework use different tools within the toolkit in order to provide their desired overall functionality. The functionality provided by the framework includes a number of primitives to be used by applications and services. These primitives mostly relate to multiparty communications and include floor control. The framework also offers support functions that relate to PSTN (Public Switched Telephony Network) interworking, policy control, and consent-based communications. Additionally, the framework contains functions that relate to signalling transport, multihoming, mobility, security, and NAT (Network Address Translation) traversal. The framework also allows building overlay networks when a SIP network infrastructure is not available. In order to test and refine the ideas presented in this dissertation, we have implemented most of them in proof-of-concept prototypes. We have used experiments and simulations to validate our assumptions and obtain new insights