From instant messaging to cloud computing, an XMPP review

The extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is a versatile protocol that demonstrates many advantages over traditional communication protocols. XMPP's origin as an instant messaging (IM) protocol ensures that it inherits a tight relation with social communities and its flexibility makes it a very good candidate for converging communications between different application domains, such as social networks, consumer electronics and cloud computing. This paper reviews the XMPP protocol, its standardization community extensions and its usage in published literature. An application domain classification, or taxonomy, is derived and used to relate complementary and competing instances of XMPP deployment.