Extending Instant Messaging to Provide Pervasive Personal Communication

This paper proposes a personal software architecture to provide a user with a pervasive communication capability. The core of this architecture is a personal communication server (PCS) which bridges between different instant messaging networks and extends them with a unified access to the user. A SIP-based implementation of such a communication server is presented, which solves various interoperability problems, and also provides many value-added features, e.g., extended user presence with location information, adaptive communication, better privacy protection, etc. This implementation enables various existing SIP-compatible resources to be re-used and thus simplifies the construction of the proposed software architecture