Programmable Presence Virtualization for Next-Generation Context-Based Applications

Presence, broadly defined as an event publish notification infrastructure for converged applications, has emerged as a key mechanism for collecting and disseminating context attributes for next-generation services in both enterprise and provider domains. Current presence-based solutions and products lack in the ability to support flexible user-defined queries over dynamic presence data and derive composite presence from multiple provider domains. Accordingly, current uses of context are limited to individual domains/organizations and do not provide a programmable mechanism for rapid creation of context-aware services. This paper describes a presence virtualization architecture, where a Virtualized Presence Server receives customizable queries from multiple presence clients, retrieves the necessary data from the base presence servers, applies the required virtualization logic and notifies the presence clients.