A USER-CENTRIC COMMUNICATION MIDDLEWARE FOR CVM

The advances in communication frameworks, such as Skype and Google Talk facilitate the increasing needs of communication-intensive and collaborative applications. These communication frameworks also make it possible for end-users to be more involved in the development of such applications if the appropriate level of abstraction can be provided. In this paper, we propose the design of a user-centric communication middleware (UCM) that supports raising the level of abstraction appropriate for end-users to create and realize models using the communication virtual ma- chine (CVM) technology. The CVM technology consists of the communication modeling language (CML) and CVM, and supports the rapid conception, construction and realiza- tion of new communication services using a model-driven approach. The UCM is a layer in CVM that provides oper- ating simplicity to the end-user by masking the underlying technology. We present the design goals of UCM, high- level architecture, a description of the runtime environment and a case study showing how the communication needs of a medical scenario is realized in the UCM.