A framework to provide charging for third party composite services

Includes synopsis.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-87).Over the past few years the trend in the telecommunications industry has been geared towards offering new and innovative services to end users. A decade ago network operators were content with offering simple services such as voice and text messaging. However, they began to notice that these services were generating lower revenues even while the number of subscribers increased. This was a direct result of the market saturation and network operators were forced to rapidly deploy services with minimum capital investment and while maximising revenue from service usage by end users. Network operators can achieve this by exposing the network to external content and service providers. They would create interfaces that would allow these 3rd party service and content providers to offer their applications and services to users. Composing and bundling of these services will essentially create new services for the user and achieve rapid deployment of enhanced services. The concept of offering a wide range of services that are coordinated in such a way that they deliver a unique experience has sparked interest and numerous research on Service Delivery Platforms (SDP). SDP‟s will enable network operators to be able to develop and offer a wide-variety service set. Given this interest on SDP standardisation bodies such as International Telecommunications Union – Telecommunications (ITU-T), Telecoms and Internet converged Servicers and Protocols for Advanced Networks) (TISPAN), 3rd Generations Partnership Project (3GPP) and Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) are leading efforts into standardising functions and protocols to enhance service delivery by network operators. Obtaining revenue from these services requires effective accounting of service usage and requires mechanisms for billing and charging of these services. The IP Multimedia subsystem(IMS) is a Next Generation Network (NGN) architecture that provides a platform for which multimedia services can be developed and deployed by network operators. The IMS provides network operators, both fixed or mobile, with a control layer that allows them to offer services that will enable them to remain key role players within the industry. Achieving this in an environment where the network operator interacts directly with the 3rd party service providers may become complicated

Service composition based on SIP peer-to-peer networks

Today the telecommunication market is faced with the situation that customers are requesting for new telecommunication services, especially value added services. The concept of Next Generation Networks (NGN) seems to be a solution for this, so this concept finds its way into the telecommunication area. These customer expectations have emerged in the context of NGN and the associated migration of the telecommunication networks from traditional circuit-switched towards packet-switched networks. One fundamental aspect of the NGN concept is to outsource the intelligence of services from the switching plane onto separated Service Delivery Platforms using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) to provide the required signalling functionality. Caused by this migration process towards NGN SIP has appeared as the major signalling protocol for IP (Internet Protocol) based NGN. This will lead in contrast to ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) and IN (Intelligent Network) to significantly lower dependences among the network and services and enables to implement new services much easier and faster. In addition, further concepts from the IT (Information Technology) namely SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) have largely influenced the telecommunication sector forced by amalgamation of IT and telecommunications. The benefit of applying SOA in telecommunication services is the acceleration of service creation and delivery. Main features of the SOA are that services are reusable, discoverable combinable and independently accessible from any location. Integration of those features offers a broader flexibility and efficiency for varying demands on services. This thesis proposes a novel framework for service provisioning and composition in SIP-based peer-to-peer networks applying the principles of SOA. One key contribution of the framework is the approach to enable the provisioning and composition of services which is performed by applying SIP. Based on this, the framework provides a flexible and fast way to request the creation for composite services. Furthermore the framework enables to request and combine multimodal value-added services, which means that they are no longer limited regarding media types such as audio, video and text. The proposed framework has been validated by a prototype implementation

An architecture for the future business of things

A brave new world made of interconnected smart devices will soon revolutionize the world. The application of the Internet of Things vision will foster the creation of new businesses across different industrial sectors. Communication Service Providers need to set the pace of this change if they want to lead this transformation. They need to both leverage and evolve their architectures in order to support a flexible creation of innovative services over distributed networks, linking heterogeneous sensors and actuators. This paper presents the roles of the telecoms on the upcoming machine-to-machine markets and devises an advanced architecture able to withstand the demands of a new plethora of evermore clever and useful services

A user-centric approach to service creation and delivery over next generation networks

Next Generation Networks (NGN) provide Telecommunications operators with the possibility to share their resources and infrastructure, facilitate the interoperability with other networks, and simplify and unify the management, operation and maintenance of service offerings, thus enabling the fast and cost-effective creation of new personal, broadband ubiquitous services. Unfortunately, service creation over NGN is far from the success of service creation in the Web, especially when it comes to Web 2.0. This paper presents a novel approach to service creation and delivery, with a platform that opens to non-technically skilled users the possibility to create, manage and share their own convergent (NGN-based and Web-based) services. To this end, the business approach to user-generated services is analyzed and the technological bases supporting the proposal are explained