Guaranteed delivery of semi-synchronous IP-based communication

Abstract

This paper presents an empirical solution for guaranteeing the delivery of synchronous and asynchronous messages within a semi-synchronous IPbased communication domain. The communication infrastructure that is needed between Deaf and hearing communities forms the application domain within which the research is situated. SoftBridging is a framework for multi-modal bridging as well as multi-user, multi-modal conversation sessions. An implementation of this concept called SoftBridge for Instant Messaging Bridging Application (SIMBA), is a communication platform that allows a hearing and Deaf person to communicate inside a single uniform space. The system makes use of various web services to do the actual data conversions such as voice to text and text to voice. Publish-subscribe systems are an emerging paradigm for building a range of distributed applications. The architecture of publishsubscribe systems make use of Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) to guarantee reliable delivery of messages within a communication domain. We have incorporated a publish-subscribe system within the overall architecture of SIMBA. We have thus modified the existing architecture of SIMBA to reliably transport semi-synchronous data over a synchronous established session. We have chosen to use the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for the establishment of a synchronous session between various users and SIMBA. The system is currently being used as a basis for developing a Deaf telephony application that guarantees the delivery of messages no matter the synchrony.