ICEBERG Version 0.0 Release Notes Web-site: http://iceberg.cs.berkeley.edu/release/ Download: http://iceberg.cs.berkeley.edu/release/iceberg0.tar.gz Contact: iceberg-devel@iceberg.cs.berkeley.edu Sat Jun 10 13:10:27 PDT 2000

ICEBERG System Introduction and Overview

Telecommunications networks are migrating towards Internet technology, with voice over IP maturing rapidly. We believe that the key open challenge for the converged network of the near future is its support for diverse access technologies (such as the Public Switched Telephone Network, digital cellular networks, pager networks, and IP-based networks) and innovative applications seamlessly integrating data and voice. The ICEBERG Project at U. C. Berkeley is seeking to meet this challenge with an open and composable service architecture founded on Internet-based standards for flow routing and agent deployment. This enables simple redirection of flows combined with pipelined transformations. These building blocks make possible new applications, like the Universal Inbox. Such an application intercepts flows in a range of formats, originating in different access networks (e.g., voice, fax, e-mail), and delivers them appropriately formatted for a particular end terminal (e.g., handset, fax machine, computer) based on the callee's preferences.

The design of the ICEBERG architecture is driven by the following types of services:

• Any-to-any communication services:
  Any-to-any communication refers to the ability to support communication between all types of devices effectively. For this purpose, we employ the Automatic Path Creation service (APC) which composes the data path between the endpoints using any format through mix-matching operators (units of computation) and connectors (transportation abstraction between operators). The use of the APC simplifies extending ICEBERG to new devices, which is only a matter of introducing new codecs or data transformation operators. By encapsulating the data flow/path management within the APC service, it reduces the complexity of the signaling protocol (the protocol for establishing and maintaining communication sessions).

  To enable any-to-any communications, integrated communication systems also need a component that inter-works with various networks for signaling translation and packetization. In our control architecture, this component is called an ICEBERG Access Point (IAP).

• Personal mobility services:
  Personal mobility means treating people, rather than devices, as communication endpoints. Every person using ICEBERG has an ICEBERG unique ID. The mapping between the specific device ID and unique ID is done through the Name Mapping Service (NMS). For this release, we use the Open LDAP directory service.

• Communication service customization:
  To allow end users to customize their communication service (such as when they want to be called, on what device, under what condition, and by whom), we use a Preference Registry (PR) to store and manage user preferences. Our philosophy here is that the callee has the total control over how they can be reached.

• User activity-driven services: ICEBERG also aims to support a new kind of communication service based on user activity. This type of service generalizes the location-based services that have appeared in many other systems. Instead of customizing the communication service based on the current user location, we allow the current user behavior (such as "I am talking to an important person") to be tracked and used for customization. Users control what behaviors are tracked as a way to control privacy. The Personal Activity Coordinator (PAC) performs the tracking. We did not incorporate the PAC in this release.

Another important decision in our architecture design is to leverage cluster computing platforms for processing scalability and local-area robustness. Our control architecture requires processing scalability to a large call volume, continuous availability through fault masking, and cost-effectiveness. Clusters of commodity PCs interconnected by a high-speed System Area Network (SAN), acting as a single large-scale computer [NOW], are especially well-suited to meeting these challenges. Cluster computing platforms, such as [ Ninja ], provide an easy service development environment for service developers and mask them from cluster management problems of load-balancing, availability, and failure management. We plan to build the ICEBERG system on Ninja for these benefits. Our current release is built on the Ninja iSpace computing platform, which does not yet provide all of the above desirable cluster characteristics. Thus, this release does not have full-fledged fault tolerance and load balancing mechanisms. In addition, this ICEBERG release heavily uses Remote Method Invocation for communication, which does not scale to large number of simulateneous invocations. For these reasons, this release serves as a prototype for people to read and run in a small scale. The following figure shows a high level view of how ICEBERG system could actually be used in the real world. The ICEBERG network plane shows two ICEBERG Service Providers representing two different administrative domains: A and B. The services they provide are customizable integrated communication services on top of the Internet. Similar to the way that Internet Service Providers (ISP) provide Internet services through the use of Points of Presence (POPs) at different geographic locations, ICEBERG Service Providers consist of ICEBERG Points of Presence (iPOPs). Both A and B have iPOPs in San Francisco (SF) and New York (NY). Each iPOP contains Call Agents (CAs) which perform call setup and control, an Automatic Path Creation Service (APC) which establishes data flow between communication endpoints, a Preference Registry (PR) for users' call receiving preference management, a Personal Activity Coordinator (PAC) for user location or activity tracking, and a Name Mapping Service (NMS) which resolves user names in various networks. iPOPs must scale to a large population and a large call volume, be highly available, and be resilient to failures. This leads us to build the iPOP on the Ninja cluster computing platform. The ICEBERG network can be viewed as an overlay network of iPOPs on top of the Internet.

You can find more details from the following papers:

• ICEBERG: An Internet-core Network Architecture for Integrated Communications [ ps.gz ] [ pdf ], IEEE Personal Communications, August 2000.
• A Signaling System Using Lightweight Call Sessions [ ps.gz ], Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM 2000, Tel-Aviv, Israel. March 2000.
• Personal Mobility in the ICEBERG Integrated Communication Network [.ps], UCB EECS Technical Report, UCB/CSD-99-1048, May 1999
• Bhaskaran Raman, Helen J. Wang, Jimmy S. Shih, Anthony D. Joseph, and Randy H. Katz The ICEBERG Project: Defining the IP and Telecom Intersection IT Professional, Nov/Dec 1999

Functionalities:

• Multi-device/endpoint communication among heterogeneous devices (GSM cellular phones and IPPhones in this release) and various service endpoints (for example the Sanctio instant message service and the Ninja Jukebox service from the Ninja project). We support an invitation-based communication model (instead of join-based model as in MBone), in which any participant can invite new call parties into the ongoing communication session.
• Service handoff: service handoff refers to the capability of switching between the devices while remaining in the same communication session. In this release we support the service handoff from a desktop phone (IPPhone) to a GSM cellular phone.
• Call receiving preference specification: in this release, users can specify their call receiving preferences through a GUI tool called preference manager or supply a Tcl script.
• Extending to new service endpoints. The release includes the capability to extend the set of services that can be accessed from end-devices. The addition of an IAP for a service results in providing all end-devices access to that service.

Components in the Release:

The following figures depict the components that are part of the release.

This figure shows the components of the iPOP that are in the release. The Call-Agent, Preference Registry, Name Mapping Service, and the Automatic Path Creation Service belong to the iPOP.

This figure shows the different IAPs that are part of the release. Also shown is the MediaManager service, which provides multi-modal access to the user's email repository.

The available IAPs in this release are:

• IPPhone -- This is an IAP to the VAT communication tool on the user's desktop. This supports multi-party calls and service-handoff.
• VAT IAP -- This is functionally a subset of the IPPhone, and is included for purposes of reference.
• GSM IAP -- This IAP is intended to work with the GSM Base-Station in our testbed.
• Jukebox IAP -- This interfaces with the Ninja Jukebox service.
• Voice-Mail IAP -- Implements a skeleton voice-mail service and also serves as an IAP for the same.
• MediaManager IAP -- IAP to interface with the MediaManager service.
• Mail-push client IAP -- This IAP is intended to read out the user's important emails, in a push fashion, to her preferred end-point.