Realising service portability with the Device Unifying Service using Parlay API

The Device Unifying Service presented in this paper is a powerful concept that realises service portability between different devices. It extends the VHE concept by allowing the usage of multiple devices simultaneously and the possibility of adding, removing or changing devices both on the fly or according to predefined profiles. The Device Unifying Service addresses both service portability for communication service and data services. Communication services like a normal phone call can for example easily be transferred from a fixed phone to a mobile phone or an IP phone with the Device Unifying Service. Additionally, a data service like a Web browsing session can be transferred from a PC to a laptop of PDA including cached information like history and bookmarks. Providing an easy way for moving services between devices, the Device Unifying Service thus fulfils the vision of service portability in an elegant way. This paper presents the concept of the Device Unifying Service, a novel service that will take care of the management, coordination and configuration of all the devices that the user has at his disposal and provide service portability and adaptation of services to devices with different characteristics. Furthermore, this paper will reveal how the first version of the Device Unifying Service has been implemented using Parlay APIs and H.323 technologies.