The mobile people architecture

Abstract

People are the outsiders in the current communications revolution. Computer hosts, pagers, and telephones are the addressable entities throughout the Internet and telephony systems. Human beings, however, still need application-specific tricks to be identified, like email addresses, telephone numbers, and ICQ IDs. The key challenge today is to find people and communicate with them personally, as opposed to communicating merely with their possibly inaccessible machines---cell phones that are turned off or PCs on faraway desktops. We introduce the Mobile People Architecture which aims to put the person, rather than the devices that the person uses, at the endpoints of a communication session. We describe a prototype that performs person-level routing; the prototype allows people to receive communication regardless of the network, device, or application they use, while maintaining their privacy.