PUCS: Personal unified communications over heterogeneous wireless networks

Communication systems are becoming more complicated to support different types of services. How to coordinate different services around a user in a flexible and customized way is a new and interesting challenge. Service providers have proposed solutions such as the Universal Communication Identifier (UCI) and IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) but they require the modification of current systems and only perform the service integration in their service domains. On the other hand, unified communications (UC) solutions have been proposed to support service integration across different service domains. In this paper, we proposed a personal unified communication system (PUCS). This system uses personal-oriented modules which allow it to integrate any communication services over heterogeneous wireless networks around a user in a customized and flexible way. Users can then enjoy unified communications in their personal domains without support from public or group service providers. The PUCS can provide users with UC capabilities such as personal mobility (PM), any-to-any communications, user presence, instant message (IM), unified messaging, speech access, and text access. The solution is scalable since it is implemented on personal domains. A further advantage is that, by using a universal personal identifier (UPI) and an alias system, a user can also be affiliated with different group domains. This makes it possible to define specific service profiles for each domain so that the user can also enjoy the unified communications provided specifically for that domain.