A Peer to Peer Architecture for Enabling a Universal Presence Service

Presence service is used to publish and discover end-users´ context information. It is the basis of a wide range of end-user services. It is deployed using a wide range of technologies, which hampers interoperability. This paper proposes a peer to peer infrastructure for enabling a universal presence service, a service that will enable end-users with multiple presence accounts in domains with different technologies to publish and discover end-user context information through a single interface. Requirements are derived, an architecture is proposed and implementation aspects are discussed. The architecture is an overlay and the related procedures and protocols are introduced. New software architecture is proposed for the implementation and the related tool kits are identified.