Abstract: 

The rapid growth of networking technologies has drastically 
changed the way we communicate and enabled a wide range of 
communication applications. However, these applications have 
been conceived, designed, and developed separately with little 
or no connection to each other, resulting in a fragmented and 
incompatible set of technologies and products. Building new 
communication applications requires a lengthy and costly 
development cycle, which severely limits the pace of innovation. 
Current applications are also typically incapable of responding 
to changes in user communication needs as well as changing network 
infrastructure and device technology. In this article, we address 
these issues and present the Unified Communication Model (UCM), 
a new and user-centric approach for conceiving, generating, and 
delivering communication applications on-demand. We also introduce 
a prototype design and implementation of UCM and discuss future 
research directions toward realizing next generation communication 
applications.