By Heather Ford (full article on ITWeb Brainstorm)
Mosiuoa Tsietsi is a postgrad student at Rhodes University who, along with Professor Alfredo Terzoli, heads up the convergence group at the Telkom Centre of Excellence. Tsietsi’s research is mainly in the area of service architectures in next generation networks, where he has taken a keen interest in experimenting with modular network architectures across a variety of platforms.
In an environment where there is intense competition between telecoms and the internet, where “people are bypassing the infrastructure of telecoms”, Tsietsi believes that there is an enormous opportunity for operators to offer competitive multimedia services to their subscribers.
The most recent application of this thinking comes from his work with the Mobicents platform. Billed as the world’s only open source Java Service Logic Execution Environment (JSLEE), Mobicents is designed to support event-driven applications that require high throughput, low latency and continuous availability.
A Service Logic Execution Environment (SLEE) is a well-known concept in the telecommunications industry that enables a communications application to be written once and then run on many different implementations.
According to Tsietsi, Mobicents enables convergence because the platform consists of a range of different services that interoperate with one another. “In the past, we had incompatible networks. Now you can provide fixed-to-mobile convergence where fixed-line and mobile subscribers are served from one network, which is IP-based at its core.”
He demonstrated a video-on-demand service using Mobicents at the dti Technology Awards last year. He hacked the Mobicents Converged Demo, which previously enabled users to order furniture off a website on a mobile phone. “That wasn’t exciting to us,” says Tsietsi. “So we hacked it together to be able to serve video files over the internet.”
He says that the application is useful because you’re able to stream video to a particular person, establishing an identity and then mapping to a specific device. “We’re able to ensure that you are who you say you are,” says Tsietsi, who adds that this may be useful for serving age-restricted video files over the net.
Rhodes is one of 16 Centres of Excellence (CoEs) in the country where academia, industry and government come together to pool resources and improve the competitiveness of the industry. Supported by Telkom, Comverse, Tellabs, Stortech, Amatole Telecommunication Services, Bright Ideas Project 39, and both the Department of Trade and Industry (dti) and the National Research Foundation (NRF), any partner can commercially develop the research output from the CoEs but they have to give preferential access to that technology to the other partners.
Professor Terzoli, who runs the convergence project with Tsietsi, has recently been awarded a dti Technology Award in the Research Collaboration category. The work of the convergence group spans every continent, with collaboration between universities from Ethiopia, Italy, Germany and Namibia. Wertlen explains: “This is a very outward-focused CoE. We’re interested in looking outside the fish bowl.”
Tsietsi is having such a great time that he’s hoping to go on to do post-doc at Rhodes. As for commercialisation of the applications he’s working on, he says: “We’re just a couple of geeks who are interested in technology and like playing around with stuff.”