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The World Wide Web (WWW) has enjoyed phenomenal growth over recent years. It has been widely embraced as a standard infrastructure over which a variety of applications can be deployed. We are witnessing a growing number of professionals relying upon the Internet to perform their work. Collaboration tools enable teams of workers in disparate locations to work together using a variety of approaches. A similar revolution to that of the WWW is taking place within the mobile telecommunications domain, with a burgeoning requirement for wireless Internet access, via the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). This paper presents a framework that enables two or more mobile users to collaborate and exchange messages using mobile devices. The system is described provides on-line multi-user collaboration service based on the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) protocol, transmitted via WAP that offers a WML interface.
The World Wide Web (WWW) continues to enjoy phenomenal growth with the promise of facilitating a digital society. Technology continues to evolve, allowing an increasingly peripatetic society to remain "connected" without any reliance upon wires. As a consequence, mobile computing is a growth area and the focus of much energy. Mobile computing heralds exciting new applications and services for information access, communication and collaboration across a diverse range of environments.
A plethora of Internet-based collaboration tools are currently available. In recent times, Chat Rooms and Instant Messaging have proved enormously popular services. The predecessor to these services is Internet Relay Chat (IRC) [1], which is an IP-based service with sophisticated support for distributed collaboration. IRC provides a variety of mechanisms for users to collaborate across the Internet with friends, colleagues and others both publicly and privately by creating and subscribing to various "channels", or chat rooms, to exchange text messages and file transfers. As such, IRC has become the de facto standard for collaboration in this arena.
At the same time, we are witnessing a huge interest for wireless devices (phones and PDAs) and services especially from professionals and people "on the move". The Short Message Service (SMS), or paging, can be considered as a significant market success either for business or entertainment purposes. The ability to exchange SMS messages provides the convenience of being able to reach anyone anytime and anywhere in urgent situations. Unfortunately, SMS has fundamental limitations that make it an unsuitable technology above which to layer collaborative services.
On the other hand, as wireless networks are bringing the idea of the "unplugged Internet" [2], a new standard, called Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) [3], is emerging and making a significant impact in the mobile market. WAP is the new de facto global standard for providing Internet communications and advanced mobile telephony services on digital mobile phones, pagers, personal digital assistants and other wireless terminals. It is an open, global standard that empowers mobile users with wireless devices to easily access and interact with information and services. WAP technology is modelled on the WWW, but adapted for small devices with low bandwidth and limited hardware capabilities.
Described in this paper is an on-line multi-user collaboration service based on the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) protocol, transmitted via WAP that offers a WML interface. A convergence of WAP and collaboration services will herald a range of new and exciting approaches for supporting mobile groups that may be potentially distributed around the world. WAP-Chat promotes a novel approach for exchanging messages between mobile users which has much potential benefit for mobile co-working and Instant Messaging.
Computer-based collaboration systems are historically related to Memex and Augment systems introduced respectively by Bush [4] Englebart [5], first systems that enabled users to interact using the computer. Since then much research has been conducted exploring groupware and shared workspaces. This research addresses many related issues: collaboration policies, architectural models, media integration, etc[8] . As a result, a plethora of conferencing and collaboration products have become available to overcome the obstacle of geographic proximity. The most popular tools are "Chat" and "Instant Messaging" tools, supported by specific protocols: IRC is the most used one. It is an IP-based protocol with sophisticated support for distributed collaboration. The IETF have ratified the IRC protocol and subsequently a proliferation of free public domain clients and servers now exist [7] and support what has become known as "WEB Chat". IRC provides a variety of mechanisms for users to collaborate across the Internet with friends, colleagues and others both publicly and privately by subscribing to various "channels", or chat rooms, to exchange text messages and file transfers. Chat services are accessible through a selection of open servers which dispatch the text messages to users joining the selected channel.
Instant Messaging systems are similar tools for keeping people connected and notified. They are targeted toward subscribed users who want to chat in a private "network", allowing members of the community to meet, discuss and exchange messages. The four main players in this field are AOL's Instant Messenger (AIM), Microsoft MSN Messaging service, Yahoo Messenger and Excite Personal Access List (PAL) Messenger. Instant Messaging Tools are becoming more and more accepted within the Internet community, some of them are being extended to mobile and wireless devices, but none are based on WAP technology.
The population is becoming increasingly mobile and desire instant communication, access to information and notification services from their wireless devices. As such, Short Message Service (SMS) a very popular service today, has been one of the first messaging tools available for mobile terminals. It is believed to have been sent, for the first time, in December 1992 from a Personal Computer (PC) to a mobile phone on the Vodafone GSM network in the UK [6]. The SMS enables two mobile terminals to exchange text messages, the text can comprise of words or numbers or an alphanumeric combination. But even though very convenient, SMS has fundamental limitations that make it an unsuitable technology with which to provide collaborative services. These limitations include unidirectional messaging; a limited fixed length message (160 characters); a message can only be sent from one point to another point.
From an end user point of view, the scenario we consider enables mobile users to chat by sending to each other instant messages. They can interact according to the instant responses of their friends/colleagues ("bodies"). In terms of functionality, the users interact with our WAP-Chat application that supports a Wireless Markup Language (WML) interface enabling them to:
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At the start of a session, users are asked to input their contact information [optional]: name, email, photo, WML home page, etc. (see figure 1A). When the user joins a channel, a hyperlinked list of the current subscribers to the channel are presented. The user can follow any of these links to view the contact information [optionally] entered by each subscriber. Once the user has joined a channel, he or she will be able to view the messages that have been sent to this channel. Accompanying each message is the name of the person that sent that message, with the name of the person hyperlinked back to their contact information (see figure 1B). The user also receives a notification message indicating when others users join and leave the channel (see figure 1C).
The system is based on a three tier architecture, but not in the traditional sense. A WAP client (tier 1) connects, via a WAP gateway, to the WWW server hosting the WAP-Chat service (tier 2) which manages collaborators on a per-user-session basis. The WWW server hosting the WAP-Chat service then connects to the IRC server (tier 3) as specified by the user at the start of the session. The WAP-Chat WWW hosted application server manages user chat sessions which, in turn, can interact with multiple IRC servers. The WAP-Chat application server is also reponsible for dynamically generating a rich WML interface for the WAP clients.
Mobile SMS messaging (or paging) can be considered as a significant market success. The ability to send text messages has proved enormously popular across many sectors of the market, in particular among younger people. A tremendous improvement over SMS, WAP-Chat is a novel service to be offered by operators for exchanging messages between mobile users which has much potential benefit for supporting mobile distributed teams, such as a field sales force, instant messaging, e-business customer support, and - not to be underestimated - for entertainment. As we move forward to ubiquitous information access, the convergence of WAP and collaboration services will yield a range of new and exciting approaches for supporting mobile groups that may be potentially distributed around the world.
[1] Oikarinen, J. and Reed, D., Internet Relay Chat Protocol,
May 1993, ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc1459.txt.
[2] Wallace, B. The Internet Unplugged.
http://www.informationweek.com/765/wireless.htm.
[3] WAP Forum: http://www.wapforum.org/.
[4] Bush, V., As we may think, 1945, Atlantic Monthly. [5] Englebart, D.C., Collaboration support provisions in
AUGMENT: in OAC Digest: Proc of the 1984 AFIPS Office of Automation Conference.
LA, Feb 1984. [6] Short Messaging Service, http://www.gsm.org/technology/sms.html. [7] Internet Relay Chat (IRC), http://search.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-kalt-irc-arch-00.txt. [8] Schooler, Eve, Conferencing and Collaboration Computing, Proceedings of the
Dagstuhl International workshop on fundamentals and perspectives on Multimedia systems, July 1994
Dagstuhl, Germany.
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Safia Djennane graduated from the Algerian Institute for Computer Science (INI) in 1992. She obtained her Master (1993) and Ph.D. (1999) from Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse France. She is a member of the Audio and Mobility group at SCR. |
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Stuart Goose received B.Sc. (1993) and Ph.D. (1997) degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southampton, England. At Siemens he leads a research group with multiple projects exploring and applying various aspects of Internet, mobility, multimedia, hypermedia, speech and audio technologies. |
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Hans Mollenhauer is a Director Future Lab at Communication on Air, the mobile and intelligent networks division of Siemens AG, Munich, Germany. He looks for innovations and new business opportunities. Since 1987 he is involved in using the Internet and is currently especially interested in the Mobile Internet. |
