Taking advantage of the Mobicents platform in the design of the SINGA environment

Abstract

This paper describes an architecture that was designed to enable access to the scenarios/challenges on the SINGA platform. SINGA is a virtual platform that enables children facing barriers of access to information, services and people to learn the ways and means to acquire the skills to overcome these barriers without relying on adults and officials. The platform imparts skills through exposing the children to challenges that would have been difficult to tackle in real-world situations. Access to SINGA challenges is via “rabbit holes” which are portals into the SINGA world. This research develops new technologies of accessing the challenges in the SINGA platform through Instant Messaging (IM) and Short Message Service (SMS) messaging. This technology is based on integrating the Mobicents platform into the software development tier landscape. Mobicents is an open source implementation of the JAIN/SLEE specification that enables developers to create, monitor and manage services that integrate voice, data and video. On its own Mobicents is limited to the above functionalities, but once integrated into the software development tier and relevant resource adaptors put in place, it can enable communication with various networks through messaging protocols in the software development tier. The various levels of the software development tier indicate the different levels of software development a developer can operate at. This research came up with two different resource adaptors for the Mobicents architecture – one to support IM and the other to support SMS messaging. Through a simple SMS or IM using a MXit application, the children can potentially access ‘rabbit holes” and subsequently challenges on the SINGA platform via this architecture. This is equivalent to allowing the children to program their needs at a MASHUP level of the software development tier without them being aware of the low-level complexities involved.