During the 2013 presidential inauguration, it is estimated that millions of people will be exchanging instant messages, which could cause heavy traffic on network lines. The ability of presence information to transmit not only text but also video and audio data will strain the networks.
This paper recognizes that this is a possibility on a daily basis, and the authors work toward alleviating that concern. The focus is on presence information, which refers to “all the information about users that applications need to make intelligent decisions for establishing and managing user communications” worldwide and across many different administrative domains and platforms. The main concern of the authors is how presence can “be a key enabler of the various convergent services supported by the future next-generation networks.”
By showing how presence service impacts the “workload that the inter-domain presence traffic optimizations [are able to] inject into the [IP multimedia services (IMS)] servers,” it may be possible to gauge the performance of various strategies that affect the quality of service (QoS). This is important, “since an excessive workload ... may cause end-to-end delays.”
The paper provides various strategies, including common subscribe (CS) and federated common subscribe (FCS), which are designed to reduce presence load. These minimize the disclosure of privacy rules and save presence traffic.
The authors effectively use figures, tables, mathematical models, and acronyms to explain how their model works.
This paper should prove useful to those interested in the ways networks can reduce overload to work more efficiently and serve more users at any given time. More and more people are subscribing to mobile devices that transmit not only text messages, but also audio and video. Such services use more bandwidth, so traffic reduction will certainly help improve network efficiency. The authors indicate that they intend to conduct a follow-on study on the costs of CS and FCS to determine the viability of a large-scale implementation at the operations network level.
