Managing Heterogeneous Services and Devices with the Device Unifying Service: Implemented with Parlay APIs

Due to the ubiquitous explosion of the Internet and the fast proliferation of heterogeneous networked devices and services, the end user are faced with a formidable task in managing it all. The Device Unifying Service presented in this paper is a novel powerful concept that allows anyone confronted with multiple devices and services to administer and manage them by themselves. With this service, different devices connected to different networks offering different types of data and communication services can be integrated and handled in a straightforward way. It allows the usage of multiple devices simultaneously and the possibility of adding, removing or changing devices in a service session. The Device Unifying Service addresses personal service management for both communication services and data services. Communication services like a normal phone call can for example easily be transferred from a fixed phone to a mobile phone or an IP phone with multimedia capabilities with the Device Unifying Service. Additionally, a data service like a WEB browsing session can be transferred from a PC to a laptop or PDA including cached information like history and bookmarks. Providing an easy way of moving services between devices, the Device Unifying Service thus fulfils the vision of service portability in an elegant way. This paper presents the concept of the Device Unifying Service, a novel service that will take care of the management, coordination and configuration of all the devices that the user has at his disposal and provide service portability and adaptation of services to devices with different characteristics. Furthermore, this paper will reveal how the first version of the Device Unifying Service has been implemented using Parlay APIs and H.323 technologies.