Architeture Design of a Network-centric Platform for Unified
Communication and Collaboration Applications
Changsup Keum
1
, Sungwon Kang
2
and Hyunjoo Bae
1
1
Future Internet Service Research Team, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute,
218 Gajeongno, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, 305-700, Republic of Korea
2
Department of Computer Science, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology,
291 Daehak-ro, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, 305-701, Republic of Korea
Keywords: Network-centric, Application Platform, Unified Communication and Collaboration.
Abstract: As an effective reuse paradigm, service-oriented computing provides a number of benefits. As another
emerging trend, mobile computing has become a most common paradigm offering the conveniences of
mobility, connectivity, ever-increasing computing power, and various sensors. However, mobile enterprise
applications with complex business logics could not be easily deployed on mobile devices owing to resource
limitations. An appealing approach to this issue is to deliver these enterprise applications by using a
network-centric platform. In this paper, we present the architecture design of a network-centric platform that
provides capabilities of UCC (unified communication and collaboration) service enablers, service creation
environment, service delivery management, and service execution environment. The presented platform is
developed with the design goals of wide applicability to diverse domains including unified communication
and collaboration domain.
1 INTRODUCTION
With the advent of smat phones, software service
industry is facing new opptunities through novel
mobile applications runing on mobile devices. Apple
has created a complete value chain for terminal-
centric mobile applications. However, these
terminal-centric mobile applications have a major
drawback of limited resources such as limited CPU
power and main memory (König-Ries, 2009).
Enterprise applications with heavy business logics
such as UCC (unified communcation and
collaboration) applications thus could not be
elegantly executed on the mobile devices.
An appealing approach to this issue is to deliver
these applications by using a network-centric
platform based on SOA (service oriented
architecture) (Tsai, 2005). In SOA, Cloud services
can be used as
reusable building blocks
for service-
based applications. SDP (service delivery platform)
refers to a set of service integration and delivery
environments (Levine, 2009). It enables efficient
creation and delivery of service-based applications
by composing cloud services accessible through
networks. Current mobile platforms such as Android
and iPhone are designed for mainly stand-alone
mobile applications, not for service-based
applications (Clark, 2008).
In this paper, we present a design of a network-
centric platform that extends the traditional SDPs
(Ohnishi, 2007); (Sunaga, 2008) to support mobile
UCC applications. Our primary insight is that
although SDP provides an adequate starting point as
a network-centric platform for mobile UCC
applications, it is not by itself sufficient. Our
approach is to create a network-centric platform by
adding novel features for UCC on top of a traditional
SDP, which provides a set of core and common
functionality required in creating and delivering
UCC applications in a network-centric paradigm.
We observed that this requires substantial additions
and adaptations to the traditional SDP.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: In
section 2, the design goals and the architecture of
our network-centric platform are described; In
section 3, application examples using our platform
are introduced to demonstrate its applicability; and,
finally, section 4 concludes the paper.
294
Keum C., Kang S. and Bae H..
Architeture Design of a Network-centric Platform for Unified Communication and Collaboration Applications.
DOI: 10.5220/0004168602940297
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing (KMIS-2012), pages 294-297
ISBN: 978-989-8565-31-0
Copyright
c
2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
2 DESIGN OF THE PLATFORM
2.1 Design Goals
The network-centric platform has the following
design goals:
One Platform: The platform integrates all key
activities for service-based mobile applications such
as development, deployment, and distribution,
management, subscription and accounting into a
single platform.
Wide Applicability: The platform should support
a wide range of mobile devices such as smart phones
and tablet PCs under different operating systems.
One-Stop Management: The platform should
support efficient and integrated management of
services including atomic services, composite
services, and abstract services through a unified
management portal.
Easy Development of Service-Based Mobile
UCC Applications: The platform should provide an
environment that supports easy creation of service-
based mobile applications that includes service
registry and enables service composition.
Open Source Based Development: The platform
should use appropriate open sources to reduce the
development cost.
2.2 Business Context of the Platform
As can be seen in Figure 1, service-based application
development requires a collaborative effort from a
chain of three stakeholders (Bertolino, 2009).
Service developers create building blocks, i.e., web
services that are available from the network, a
platform provider then publishes and maintains the
services, and finally application developers compose
the published services into a new service-based
application.
In our platform, the service life-cycle thus has
three stages: service development, service testing,
and service publication. The developed web services
are expected to be published in the registry in the
platform for discovery by the application developers.
Application life-cycle includes the following stages:
service-based application development, in which a
service-based application is developed by service
composition; service-based application testing; and
service-based application deployment. Finally, an
end user uses the service-based application. Benefits
from end-users can be shared among all stakeholders
of this value chain.
Figure 1: Business context diagram.
2.3 High-level Functional Architecture
Figure 2 shows the overall functional architecture
of the platform.
Figure 2: High-level functional architecture.
It consists of the following FGs (functional
groups):
Service Creation Environment FG includes
service creation related functionalities including
service registry, service creation, and service
testing.
Service Execution Environment FG includes
service execution related functionalities including
web application server, access control, and policy
control.
Service Delivery Management FG includes
management related functionalities including
service deployment, service life-cycle
management, one-stop management portal, and
service usage metering.
UC Service Enabler FG includes service
enablers for basic communications, enterprise
social networks, and knowledge collaboration.
ArchitetureDesignofaNetwork-centricPlatformforUnifiedCommunicationandCollaborationApplications
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2.4 Deployment Architecture
Figure 3 shows the deployment architecture of
mobile UCC applications based on our platform. A
mobile application client invokes Open APIs
(application programming interface) of UCC cloud
services in the network-centric platform through
web service protocols such as SOAP (simple object
access protocol) and REST (representational state
transfer). Each cloud UCC service receives Open
APIs and then translates them into appropriate
network protocols to communicate with back-end
servers. In this way, our approach relieves
application developers of a burden in service-based
application deployment by deploying complex
business logic on the network side instead of the
mobile device side.
Figure 3: Deployment architecture.
3 UCC APPLICATION EXAMPE
We have developed several mobile UCC
applications by using our platform to demonstrate
applicability of our platform. Figure 4 shows
snapshots of example mobile applications such as
cocoGate, cocoBox, and cocoKwiki. Among them,
we introduce our representative mobile UCC
application, cocoGate. The cocoGate application
implemented on top of Android 2.2 provides an
advanced unified communication service that
integrates basic communications such as call, SMS
(short message service), e-mail, and chatting with
enterprise SNS (social networking service) through a
unified user interface. The client application of
cocoGate executing on a mobile device is composed
of UI (user interface) and light-weight controller for
business logic that invokes Open API of the
network-centric platform. The server side of the
cocoGate, the network-centric platform, provides a
variety of UCC cloud services through Open APIs,
which enables the mobile applications to utilize
basic communications and enterprise SNS. The UC
back-end servers, such as IPPBX (internet protocol
private branch exchange) and Instance Messenger,
provide UCC server functionalities for call, SMS, e-
mail, chatting, and enterprise SNS through native
communication protocols such as SIP (session
initiation protocol) and XMPP (extensible
messaging and presence protocol).
(a) cocoGate UCC application
(b) cocoBox (c) cocoKwiki
Figure 4: Snapshots of mobile UCC applications.
Our platform also provides a set of application
distribution functionalities through a web page,
called Coco Web store, which are similar to
Google’s Web store. In particular, the UCC
applications are distributed in a secure way that they
can be accessed and utilized only by authorized
users and devices.
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4 CONCLUSIONS
Many stand-alone applications are available for
mobile devices. However, they suffer from limited
resources such as CPU power and main memory.
Heavy enterprise applications such as UCC
applications that have complex business logics and
consume a large amount of resources cannot be
easily deployed on mobile devices.
To alleviate the issues for developing and
deploying complex mobile applications, we have
designed and implemented a network-centric
platform, NCP, which integrates all necessary
functionalities for mobile applications such as UCC
cloud service enablers, service creation environment,
and service delivery management into a single
platform.
To demonstrate applicability of our platform, we
developed various mobile UCC applications by
using the platform. The result shows that the
platform effectively supports easy and efficient
creation, deployment, and distribution of mobile
UCC applications in a network-centric way.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research was supported by the KCC (Korea
Communications Commission), Korea, under the
R&D program supervised by the KCA (Korea
Communications Agency) [KCA-2012-(09911-
05001)].
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