The pros and cons of using SDL for creation of distributed services

In a competitive market for the creation of complex distributed services, time to market, development cost, maintenance and flexibility are key issues. Optimizing the development process is very much a matter of optimizing the technologies used during service creation. This paper reports on the experience gained in the Service Creation projects SCREEN and TOSCA on use of the language SDL for efficient service creation

Experiences in Integrated Multi-Domain Service Management

Increased competition, complex service provision chains and integrated service offerings require effective techniques for the rapid integration of telecommunications services and management systems over multiple organisational domains. This paper presents some of the results of practical development work in this area, detailing the technologies and standards used, the architectural approach taken and the application of this approach to specific services. This work covers the integration of multimedia services, broadband networks, service management and network management, though the detailed examples given focus specifically on the integration of services and service management

Validation of the Parlay API through prototyping

The desire within the telecommunications world for new and faster business growth has been a major drive towards the development of open network API. Over the past 7 years several (semi) standardization groups have announced work on network API, including TINA-C, JAIN, IEEE P1520, INforum, 3GPP, JAIN, Parlay. The Parlay group seems most successful in attracting industry awareness with their API, called the Parlay API. The rational behind the Parlay API is that it attracts innovation from third parties that are outside the network operator's domain to build and deploy new network-hosted applications. This also means that the public telecommunication network is opened for niche and short-lived applications as well as for applications that possibly integrate telephones with other terminals such as PC. The Parlay group has successfully passed the first two phases of success, namely publishing their API on the right moment in time and attracting a critical mass within the telecommunication industry with their results. Prototyping the API on a real network execution platform is the only way to show its technical feasibility. Such an exercise was executed internally within Lucent Technologies and raised a number of questions as well as recommendations on both the technical and the semantical behavior for systems that will be interconnected via the Parlay API. We share these results, showing the drawbacks and advantages as well as challenges for this AP

The future of enterprise groupware applications

This paper provides a review of groupware technology and products. The purpose of this review is to investigate the appropriateness of current groupware technology as the basis for future enterprise systems and evaluate its role in realising, the currently emerging, Virtual Enterprise model for business organisation. It also identifies in which way current technological phenomena will transform groupware technology and will drive the development of the enterprise systems of the future

Service-Oriented Architecture for Space Exploration Robotic Rover Systems

Currently, industrial sectors are transforming their business processes into e-services and component-based architectures to build flexible, robust, and scalable systems, and reduce integration-related maintenance and development costs. Robotics is yet another promising and fast-growing industry that deals with the creation of machines that operate in an autonomous fashion and serve for various applications including space exploration, weaponry, laboratory research, and manufacturing. It is in space exploration that the most common type of robots is the planetary rover which moves across the surface of a planet and conducts a thorough geological study of the celestial surface. This type of rover system is still ad-hoc in that it incorporates its software into its core hardware making the whole system cohesive, tightly-coupled, more susceptible to shortcomings, less flexible, hard to be scaled and maintained, and impossible to be adapted to other purposes. This paper proposes a service-oriented architecture for space exploration robotic rover systems made out of loosely-coupled and distributed web services. The proposed architecture consists of three elementary tiers: the client tier that corresponds to the actual rover; the server tier that corresponds to the web services; and the middleware tier that corresponds to an Enterprise Service Bus which promotes interoperability between the interconnected entities. The niche of this architecture is that rover's software components are decoupled and isolated from the rover's body and possibly deployed at a distant location. A service-oriented architecture promotes integrate-ability, scalability, reusability, maintainability, and interoperability for client-to-server communication.Comment: LACSC - Lebanese Association for Computational Sciences, http://www.lacsc.org/; International Journal of Science & Emerging Technologies (IJSET), Vol. 3, No. 2, February 201