I have attempted to follow the discussions on the "OPES ownership" thread,
and I have a few comments. To me it appears to be very important to
allow clients
to easily download proxylets/rule sets into OPES boxes, in addition to
content providers.
The OPES environment therefore, IMHO, should not become CP/CDN centric.
IMHO, OPES could be crucial in enabling open service creation
environments in fully VoIP based
converged voice and data networks where the interactions tend to be
peer-to-peer rather than
a content provider-content sink model.
Some thoughts on how I think OPES could be used in future....
(1) In future, there could be cases where OPES boxes are simply
"application level active
networking" environments. Clients should be able to download/upload rule
sets
and code into these boxes on a per-session/groups of sessions basis, as
they wish.
(2) Such boxes may be provided by access network providers or "compute
power
distribution networks" similar to "content distribution networks" that
are popular
currently. These networks will essentially lease CPU cycles, memory,
disk space etc.
to users. Such an infrastructure will especially be useful as a large
number of thin
wireless clients begin getting connected to the Internet using fully
packet based transport
mechanisms over the air.
(3) A network intermediary close to the client has the privelege of
keeping track of
a collection of sessions a user is involved in. While this knowledge
could be put to
malicious use, it can also be used constructively. One good example I
can think of
is in providing "composable services" (I use quotes as the term can mean
different
things to different people). By "composable services", I mean a service
environment
where a user is able to "pipe together" diverse services to accomplish
something useful.
For example, a user may want to "cut and paste" content from a web page
into a voice
conversation, or vice versa. In other cases, they may do more classic
OPES operations like
plug in transcoders into a SIP conversation when a SIP call set up fails
due to mis match in
the capabilities of the two end points. Composable service providers
may make use of the
OPES framework to construct such services and make them available to
end users.
Please do correct me if you think I have an incorrect understanding of
the aptness of applying
OPES in these application scenarios. On the other hand if you believe
our discussions will
allow such scenarios to be realized using OPES as outlined above, great !!
-Jayanth
--
Jayanth P. Mysore
Lead Research Engineer
Networks and Infrastructure Research Laboratory,
Motorola Labs
Phone : (847) 576-8561