User-Centric Communication Middleware

The development of communication applications today follows a vertical development approach where each application is built on top of low-level network abstractions such as the socket interface. This stovepipe development process is a major inhibitor that drives up the cost of development and slows down the pace of innovation of new generation of communication applications. In this paper, we propose a user-centric communication middleware (UCM) that provides a unified higher-level abstraction for the class of multimedia communication applications. We investigate the minimum set of necessary requirements for this abstraction from the perspective of next-generation communication applications, and provide an API that exemplifies this abstraction. We demonstrate how UCM encapsulates the complexity of network-level communication control and media delivery. Further, we show how its extensible and self-managing design supports dynamic adaptation in response to changes in network conditions and application requirements with negligible overhead. Finally, we argue that UCM enables rapid development of portable communication applications, which can be easily deployed on IP-based networking infrastructure.