ChaiTime': A System for Rapid Creation of Portable Next-Generation Telephony
Farooq M. Anjum, Francesco Caruso, Ravi Jain, Paolo Missier, Adalberto Zordan · 1999
We present the architecture, design and expel-i- mental research prototype implementation of ChaiTime, an open system architecture for the rapid development of advanced next- generation telephony services that overcomes some of the limita- tions of the current closed PSTN architecture and service model. ChaiTime allows communication sessions to be set up over the PSTN, the Internet, or a combination of both. Services can lie provided by multiple cooperating distributed service providers, some of whom may use third-party soflware components which can be plugged or even dynamically downloaded from the network as needed. This allows advanced services to be de- ployed and delivered to users rapidly, a crucial requirement in the increasingly competitive telecommunications services mar- ketplace. ChaiTime is built upon an object-oriented call model called Java Call Control (JCC) which we have defined as a small set of extensions to the standard Java Telephony API (JTAPI) call model that allows support for distributed providers as well as advanced services. JCC hides details of underlying call-state management, protocols and hardware from applications. In our prototype, we have designed a small set of extensions to SIIP, called Extended SIP, for supporting advanced services. The ChaiTime prototype software is currently operational in our laboratory. We briefly describe its current implementation its well as future work to address issues such as fault tolerance.