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

A model-based approach to service creation

This paper presents a model-based approach to support service creation. In this approach, services are assumed to be created from (available) software components. The creation process may involve multiple design steps in which the requested service is repeatedly decomposed into more detailed functional parts, until these parts can be mapped onto software components. A modelling language is used to express and enable analysis of the resulting designs, in particular the behaviour aspects. Methods are needed to verify the correctness of each design step. A technique called behaviour refinement is introduced to assess the conformance relation between an abstract behaviour and a more concrete (detailed) behaviour. This technique is based on the application of abstraction rules to determine the abstraction of the concrete behaviour such that the obtained abstraction can be compared to the original abstract behaviour. The application of this refinement technique throughout the creation process enforces the correctness of the created servic

Engineering of interworking TINA-based telecommunication services

This paper describes a Service Creation approach being developed in the EU funded ACTS TOSCA (TINA Open Service Creation Architecture) project to rapidly develop validated TINA based multimedia telecommunications services. The approach is based around object-oriented software frameworks in SDL which are specialized towards services by means of graphical paradigm tools. Further, in TOSCA, the need for service interworking across service provider domains via federation has been recognized in order to allow users to join service sessions offered by providers they are not customers of. However, service interworking may cause undesired behavior - the so called service interaction phenomenon. This paper focuses on this issue and the underlying technology of the service creation approach with emphasis on how service federation has been implemented

Open-standards rich media mobile platform & rapid deployment service creation tool

This paper builds upon the work carried out by Brunel University in the field of "Fast Prototyping And Semi-automated User Interface And Application Generation for Converged Broadcast and Cellular Terminals" [1]. This work involved the development of a service creation application for interactive services on mobile devices and methodologies and tools to speed up and deskill the deployment process. This paper aims at further enhancing these tools and presents an enhanced open standards reference platform for mobile digital TV and rich media services. By using a Scalar Vector Graphics (SVG)-driven Java MIDP application (as opposed to bitmapped raster graphics-driven MHP), rich media services can be broadcast to mobile devices running various Java-supported platforms with a user interface scalable to any screen size. Moreover, the Rich Media Mobile Browser is integrated into a service creation tool, therefore enabling rapid testing and deployment of rich mobile media services. The following sections detail the motivation behind the need for a platform which allows for rich media play-out on mobile devices, along with the rich media mobile viewing application and the tools used to create and test rich media with speed and ease

Automatic Intent-Based Secure Service Creation Through a Multilayer SDN Network Orchestration

Growing traffic demands and increasing security awareness are driving the need for secure services. Current solutions require manual configuration and deployment based on the customer's requirements. In this work, we present an architecture for an automatic intent-based provisioning of a secure service in a multilayer - IP, Ethernet, and optical - network while choosing the appropriate encryption layer using an open-source software-defined networking (SDN) orchestrator. The approach is experimentally evaluated in a testbed with commercial equipment. Results indicate that the processing impact of secure channel creation on a controller is negligible. As the time for setting up services over WDM varies between technologies, it needs to be taken into account in the decision-making process.Comment: Parts of the presented work has received funding from the European Commission within the H2020 Research and Innovation Programme, under grant agreeement n.645127, project ACIN

CGI::Auto: automatic web-service creation

The creation of a CGI or a WebService as an interface for a command line tool is not as unusual as it may seem. It is extremely usual and useful. There are applications developed as command line tools that can be useful for different purposes, and different kind of users. Some of these users might not be able to run these tools directly. For instance, it is not easy to install a bunch of Perl modules to have a small tool working. For these situations, it is easier to make the tool available in the Web or as a WebService. The problem with making the tool available in these fashions, is that programmers tend to rewrite the tools to incorporate the CGI or XML specific layers. We defend that these CGI or WebService interfaces should use the already available command line tool, without any change. This interface should be able to read a simple textual specification of how the command line tool works, and buid the CGI or XML specific layers automatically. The CGI::Auto module aims this purpose: to encapsulate command line tools in a CGI layer based on a textual specification, transforming the command line tool in a web application

Creating telecommunication services based on object-oriented frameworks and SDL

This paper describes the tools and techniques being applied in the TINA Open Service Creation Architecture (TOSCA) project to develop object-oriented models of distributed telecommunication services in SDL. The paper also describes the way in which Tree and Tabular Combined Notation (TTCN) test cases are derived from these models and subsequently executed against the CORBA-based implementations of these services through a TTCN/CORBA gateway

A MARK-UP APPROACH TO SERVICE CREATION

The paper presents a new mark-up approach to service creation in Next Generation Networks. The approach allows access to network functions exposed by open application programming interfaces. Based on ontology analysis of the application domain, language constructions are synthesized and formally defined. Language supporting tools are developed. The approach functionality is tested by simulation

Reducing service creation time leveraging on network function virtualization

Fifth-generation (5G) networks are envisioned to simultaneously support several services with different connectivity requirements. In this respect, service creation time is a key performance indicator (KPI) for service providers when planning the migration to 5G. For example, the European 5G infrastructure public private partnership (5G-PPP) suggests to reduce this time from 90 hours to 90 minutes, in the different phases of the service creation time KPI identified by this organization. This reduction can be achieved by leveraging on 5G state-of-the-art technologies: network function virtualization, network slicing, software-defined networking, and cloud computing, among others. Although some authors and projects have already studied the service creation time KPI in 5G, there is no literature that comprehensively analyzes and presents results related to each phase of this KPI. In this article, we explore the potential of network function virtualization technologies to reduce service creation time. To this end, we investigate the various phases of the service creation time KPI by designing and implementing, a realistic as well as complex network service that leverages on network function virtualization and related technologies. For our use case, we chose a content delivery network service specifically designed to distribute video. This decision was based on an analysis where we considered several parameters, like the complexity in the phases of design, fulfillment, and service assurance. We dissected all phases of the service creation time KPI required to turn our service blueprint into a deployment by utilizing network function virtualization tools. Henceforth, we defined and conducted several experiments, which were oriented to analyzing the different phases of the service creation time KPI. After analyzing the obtained results, we can conclude that using these new tools permits a substantial reduction in the time taken by each phase of the service creation time KPI.publishe