Towards policy driven self-configuration of user-centric communication

The convergence of various multimedia communications that includes voice, video and data presents many opportunities for enabling unified communication but paradoxically leads to inefficiencies for the user as the communication may become complex. Model driven technologies such as the Communication Virtual Machine (CVM) propose to reduce such complexity through the use of models to define a user's communication needs. The CVM was extended to utilize multiple common-off-the-self (COTS) communication APIs such as Skype and Smack which we refer to as communication frameworks, to promote service and network independence. However, the user's current priorities and context play no role in the use and configuration of these frameworks.

In this paper we introduce the notion of policy driven self-configuration into the CVM, where high level user policies play a major role in the self-configuration decisions. We show the results of a feature analysis of the domain which guided the policy definition process. We also provide a design of the policy driven self-configuring architecture.