[IMS Group] Presence- how-to?

[Amit Agarwala]

Dear all,

We have been struggling on the best way forward for deploying “presence” centered applications.

 

Discovering one’s presence has evolved (my info surely is not the latest):

1. Rudimentary HLR-based “current” BTS info  (2-4 mile radius at best)
2. GPS on the phone
3. Assisted GPS by triangulation through 3 BTS towers.
4. more?

 

Of 2^nd, 3^rd & others, have there been successful deployments?  I have heard of “trials” & “technologies”, but nothing about real deployments.

 

_______________________________

Amdale Software Technologies

Gurgaon, Haryana, India

 

Tel.    +91 124 4060522

Mobile: +91 9810156594

Fax:    +91 124 4069590

Email: Am...@Amdale.com

 

Web: www.amdale.com 

 

 

[alan lloyd]

Hi Amit.. a great question and may I explore it slightly

 

There are aspects of presence..

• Location and how one knows that – can be GPC codes
• How it is passed on the basis that in some cases this is allowed by the user and under some conditions prohibited
• Then there is their user status – is their device issuing coordinates, but the user is off line DND or online
• Then there is the system itself about location based events
• Single view of info with status and location
• And then there are info engineering issues in that a user and device can have static data and ephemeral data  and that changes in the ephemeral data needs to be notified to other users for example

 

IMHO its best to have a event driven presence enabled SDP to deal with the above…as the address books and users have to be managed too

 

Having a “presence server”  IMHO  is not really addressing presence based services in the best way

 

Best wishes alan

 

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[Josef Sevcik]

Hi,

just to avoid further confusion, I'll use term "location" instead of "presence".
There are several ways how to locate subscribers, depending on the capabilities of RAN. Different techniques are used in GSM and different in WCDMA - e.g. triangulation is not possible in GSM RAN, on the other hand, in GSM you can measure distance from base station.

The most accurate is assisted GPS, which is standard GPS technology in handset enhanced by communication channel with operator's location solution. This brings two main advantages: faster convergence, as GPS in handset get quicly some estimation about its location and time from the network, so knows which sattelites to look for; and operator can access subscriber location from his GPS. This technology has been deployed in commercial traffic.

As A-GPS is pretty accurate and fullfills the needs of most applications, I don't think there is room for another revolutional location technology, and I haven't heard of any.

BR,

Josef

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[Schumann Sebastian]

Amit,

 

you might check out the new Google Maps for mobile phones with their new feature Latitude.

 

Although this is not an IMS application, I would consider it as successful deployment of what you describe. I can have my mobile switched on, running the app and based on the BTS I am in and also assisted GPS (tried it on Nokia E71, if not the position will be there but just a little less accurate) you share your actual position within your friends list.

 

Best regards

Sebastian

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From: imsgroup...@imsforum.org [mailto:imsgroup...@imsforum.org] On Behalf Of Amit Agarwala

Sent: Tuesday, 31. March 2009 07:15

To: imsg...@imsforum.org
Subject: [IMS Group] Presence- how-to?

[Banibrata Dutta]

2009/3/31 Amit Agarwala <am...@amdale.com>

Dear all,

We have been struggling on the best way forward for deploying “presence” centered applications.

 

Discovering one’s presence has evolved (my info surely is not the latest):

1. Rudimentary HLR-based “current” BTS info  (2-4 mile radius at best)
2. GPS on the phone
3. Assisted GPS by triangulation through 3 BTS towers.
4. more?

The 3 BTS triangulation w/o assisting GPS. Something that Google does. 

And there used to be technologies like dedicated Beacons (not sure if there were any real deployments, few trials did happen).

--
regards,
Banibrata
http://www.linkedin.com/in/bdutta

[alan lloyd]

Thanks -  Sachin… the issue with a presence “server” is its (lack of) data model ---  and how that integrates with the users, the devices, the status of services, dynamic DNS – and how it it managed and earns revenue..  re self care, and services management  and presence and event based services

 

IMHO  -  Such architectures are “connectivity architectures” which don’t reflect the information and identity management issues.

 

I actually refer to these diagrams as “connectivity architectures” because they don’t actually define the users, services, management or scale or capacity…or how they integrate.

 

 

Best wishes alan

 

 

 

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From: Sachin Parnami [mailto:sachin...@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, April 05, 2009 11:38 PM
To: alan....@wwite.com
Cc: am...@amdale.com; imsg...@imsforum.org
Subject: Re: [IMS Group] Presence- how-to?

 

Sorry to interrupt the discussion To the best of my knowledge Event driven Server for Presence has been implemented, which is one of the Open Source Jain-Slee, Sip-Servlet Project named as Mobicents (JBCP) a division of RadHat :)   

Its architecture is located at
http://mobicents-public.googlegroups.com/web/MobicentsSipPresenceServerArchitecture.jpg?gda=hTO2O1wAAAAF_VX0TG5xx-FBSRUj3rSwIO4FCNj8IiPb7zdEEjjYwlAgDLzQ8i_XkNckzGVsS4tcrsHvKlAHZlMtp5btUQdlZU3ceRGzPAq0DrjjiW76mv1ab5qObNWgAVSUTtz98C0

And other information can be found at

http://hudson.jboss.org/hudson/job/MobicentsBooks/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/sip-presence/index.html#ittsps-Architecture_of_the_SIP_Presence_Service


Please forgive if being a rookie, mailing some thing unrelated :)

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--
Regards,
Sachin Parnami

[Tom Nolle Public]

The operators and others I’ve dealt with tend to separate the terms “location” and “presence” as follows:

 

• “Location” is the geographic location of the user (or the instrument that represents the user), in some accepted coordinate system (Lat/long).

 

• “Presence” is the state of availability of the user for communications relationships, on a specific channel or overall.

 

Where multiple channels are involved; the definition needs to be refined:

 

• “Location” is the location of the communications instrument that is known to, at that moment, have the highest probability of being in the physical possession and control of the user.

 

• “Presence” is the composite state of the user across the range of available channels, reflecting how the user would (by policy) interpret his use of a given channel as a factor determining his “presence”.

 

An example of this might be that a user with two cellphones and a wireline connection plus a desktop with IM might be said to be convincingly in the location of one of the instruments if there was specific indication that the user had interacted through that instrument recently and had since done nothing elsewhere that indicated a change of behavior.  If I respond to an SMS on a given cellphone I am probably where that phone is located (via GPS, triangulation, etc.).

 

On presence, a user might say that their decision to take a cellphone call reflected their highest level of “busy-ness” and thus rendered their presence “unavailable”.  On the other hand they might say that their use of IM or SMS had no effect on their receptivity overall and thus didn’t impact their presence state.

 

Tom

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From: imsgroup...@imsforum.org [mailto:imsgroup...@imsforum.org] On Behalf Of Josef Sevcik
Sent: Friday, April 03, 2009 2:14 AM
To: am...@amdale.com
Cc: imsg...@imsforum.org
Subject: Re: [IMS Group] Presence- how-to?

 

Hi,

[Andre Torres]

Hi Josef, nice comments.

 

A-GPS seems to be the best and accurate solution, IMHO.

 

But I would raise the cost issue. Depending on the application, maybe a less accurate location service is acceptable and requires lower cost terminals. For instance, Google Latitude is a nice service, working fine for GPS e non-GPS equipped mobile phones. Even for non-GPS equipped, I believe it fulfils the “location” or “location sharing” service, but is far away from a navigation service, of course. In the future I believe most of mobiles will integrate some GPS, but today it would be important to deal also with the existing terminals, I think.

 

BTW, how the location works under a GSM network (options 1 and 3 on Amit’s mail)? OK, it is possible to measure the distance from the BS and give the radius location, but how a service like Google Latitude or other knows which BS are serving you and further, how it knows the coordinates of this BS. Does the operator share this kind of info?

 

BR,

 

Andre

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From: Josef Sevcik [mailto:josef....@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, April 03, 2009 3:14 AM
To: am...@amdale.com
Cc: imsg...@imsforum.org
Subject: Re: [IMS Group] Presence- how-to?

 

Hi,

[Peter Davies]

Does this not deliver into the area of "service enablers"
 
So the functionality of the HSS and databases within networks looking to deliver applications and services to end users across all types of connection and to all end devices, be the connection wire line or wire less. The end points may be handheld or desk tops.
 
Also the presence might expand to cover connection type or social attachment, am I working or relaxing, because one's list of friend may be different, which might imply your chosen communication type might change.
 
E.G in a work meeting no voice calls, however SMS, IM or multi player games are ok. In the social area, voice only or rich calls where video or images can be sent along with the voice session.
 
Just a few thoughts
 
Peter 
 

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From: tno...@cimicorp.com
To: josef....@gmail.com; am...@amdale.com
Subject: RE: [IMS Group] Presence- how-to?
Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 10:21:18 -0400
CC: imsg...@imsforum.org

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[Ibrahim Dawood]

Hello All,

 

I agree with Tom in differentiation between "presence" and "location" .... currently, some systems use the concept of "follow-me" which is somehow similar to presence, yet it is set manually by the end user to say that he/she will be available to receive calls, faxes, email, etc... on a cell phone, IM, etc...

 

I believe a combination of location (from where did the last registration come), status (available, busy, etc) and even the last activity (a call, sms, IM, etc) to determine the best probability for the user to be available and pick up his call(s) ... the objective as I believe will not be to make sure that the user answers the call, but mainly to make sure that the user notices it ... aother mechanism could be to broadcast the call to all possible locations of the user, though not intellegent and will introduce more signaling over the network, so imagine it is a Telco network then this may cause problems.

 

Thanks,

Ibrahim

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From: Tom Nolle Public <tno...@cimicorp.com>
To: Josef Sevcik <josef....@gmail.com>; am...@amdale.com
Cc: imsg...@imsforum.org
Sent: Sunday, April 5, 2009 5:21:18 PM

Subject: RE: [IMS Group] Presence- how-to?

Gurgaon, Haryana , India

 

Tel.    +91 124 4060522

Mobile: +91 9810156594

Fax:    +91 124 4069590

Email: Am...@Amdale.com

 

Web: www.amdale.com 

 

 

[Josef Sevcik]

Andre,

the less accurate positioning methods for legacy terminals/areas without GPS coverage are commercially available - for example take a look here:
http://www.ericsson.com/technology/positioning_methods/index_pos.shtml

Advantage is, that these methods require no special support from the terminal.

Apart of these, other methods were developed, like terminal based E-OTD or OTDOA.

I have no clue how Google gets the cell information - it's not public and I don't see any reason why operators should share this inforamtion with google, as they compete with own MPS applications. Google probably did lot of hard work - data collection and data mining.

BR,

Josef

[alan lloyd]

Hi  - understand the difference between presence and location   - probably with this email I was being subtle J   re event management and where that might be in an architecture  !!!

 

The requirements have emerged for location based services, location based security, location based, presence enabled notifications  - in that:

All of these requirements have location based events and status based events being generated.. and the services management system needs to be aware that events can possibly continually occur and may be at very high rates.  Such events need to be processed as to continuance, authorization, service fall back, priority, violation (spamming/ out of zone), logs and rating..

 

Such systems I would have thought needed some very visible and policy based priority event  processing  as well as dynamic service management..

 

Also note – if you are telling anyone where you are through GPS , make sure their usage/disclosure and privacy policies are in place..

 

Best wishes alan

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From: imsgroup...@imsforum.org [mailto:imsgroup...@imsforum.org] On Behalf Of alan lloyd
Sent: Sunday, April 05, 2009 8:10 PM
To: am...@amdale.com; imsg...@imsforum.org
Subject: RE: [IMS Group] Presence- how-to?

 

Hi Amit.. a great question and may I explore it slightly

[Jose M Recio]

Actually collecting the data didn't require hard work from Google: users perform most of the work.

On GPS handsets the Google Maps mobile applet uploads the pair (CellID, GPS coordinates) to Google server from time to time (with the user's consent). CellID is available from handset API (e.g. Symbian, ...).

As this is done automatically by the Google Maps application, data is continuously being updated by users. 

 

 

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De: imsgroup...@imsforum.org [mailto:imsgroup...@imsforum.org] En nombre de Josef Sevcik
Enviado el: lunes, 06 de abril de 2009 20:33
Para: Andre Torres; am...@amdale.com
CC: imsg...@imsforum.org
Asunto: Re: [IMS Group] Presence- how-to?