An autonomic framework for user-centric communication services

The diversity of communication media now available on IP networks presents opportunities to create elaborate collaborative communication applications. However, developing collaborative communication applications can be challenging when using the traditional stovepiped development approach with lengthy development cycle as well as limited utility. One proposed solution to this problem is the Communication Virtual Machine (CVM). CVM uses a user-centric communication (UCC) approach to reduce the complexity while offering operating simplicity to developers and users of collaborative communication services. CVM currently utilizes only one communication framework which limits the number, quality and types of services available. We extend the CVM to support multiple communication frameworks with a policy-driven approach for the selection and configuration of communication services. Users define policies that, through automation, can maintain high level goals by influencing the selection and configuration decisions. In this paper we provide a policy definition for UCC and a technique to evaluate these UCC policies. We also present our autonomic framework for UCC and experimental evaluation of the implementation.