Service interaction management in SIP user device using Feature Interaction Management Language

Emerging packet-switched architectures, such as Internet telephony, introduce new complications to manage the Feature Interaction (FI) problem. Those difficulties are generated by sophisticated technical properties. The latter are mainly distribution of data and control, equipment heterogeneity, network openness to third party service providers, and end user programmability. Our solution approach to this complicated situation, proposed in previous work, consists in establishing a cooperation relation among all the involved business players. This results in an architecture model, where an authors designed service description language, called FIML, plays the role of cooperation interface between the involved parts. The present paper presents the results of an experimental research performed on a SIP-based Internet telephony framework. The aim is to implement and test the user device part of the proposed architecture model. So, single-user-single-component FI are detected and solved in user device. For that purpose, we introduced a service creation environment and a FI management procedure. The article explains how those software elements have contributed to manage FI, in a step-by-step manner, where semantic errors are detected and avoided, then FI are detected and solved, and finally, user preferred reactions to possible exclusion of some preferences are specified to be applied at runtime.