Emerging research areas in SIP-based converged services for extended Web clients

The convergence of Next Generation Networks and Internet-based rich applications are generating relevant industrial opportunities in the market of mobility-enabled services. Even if this trend is widely recognized, there are still a few industrial-level solutions that effectively support session mobility in a transparent way and with the capability of openly integrating with existing and legacy applications. In this paper we propose a SIP-based hybrid architecture for Web session mobility that offers content sharing and session handoff between Web browsers. In addition, its technical originality includes integrating a SIP stack into a Web browser, thus offering the advantage of extending a Web browser to act as a SIP client. Lastly, a rich set of control services that prevent abuse of content sharing and session handoff are introduced into the proposed system. The implemented solution uses SIP in a standard way to migrate Web sessions between Web browsers; it is made up of a SIP integrated Web client and a converged (SIP and HTTP) Application Server that can be easily used to enable session mobility in any kind of Web-based application. In addition, the implemented system has recently evolved to a framework for developing different kinds of converged services over the Internet, analogously to what is possible with Google Wave and the existing telephony APIs. Finally, the paper reports the evaluation of the proposed framework and of the employed technologies, together with directions of future work, in terms of both extension to other application domains and exploration of research areas/models that can benefit form the adoption of SIP andWeb-related solutions