TINA as a virtual market place for telecommunication and information services: the VITAL experiment

The VITAL (Validation of Integrated Telecommunication Architectures for the Long-Term) project has defined, implemented and demonstrated an open distributed telecommunication architecture (ODTA) for deploying, managing and using a set of heterogeneous multimedia, multi-party, and mobility services. The architecture was based on the latest specifications released by TINA-C. The architecture was challenged in a set of trials by means of a heterogeneous set of applications. Some of the applications were developed within the project from scratch, while some others focused on integrating commercially available applications. The applications were selected in such a way as to assure full coverage of the architecture implementation and reflect a realistic use of it. The VITAL experience of refining and implementing TINA specifications and challenging the resulting platform by a heterogeneous set of services has proven the openness, flexibility and reusability of TINA. This paper describes the VITAL approach when choosing the different services and how they challenge and interact with the architecture, focusing especially on the service architecture and the Ret reference point definitions. The VITAL adjustments and enhancements to the TINA architecture are described. This paper contributes to proving that the TINA-based VITAL ODTA allows for easy and cost-effective development and deployment of advanced end-user and operator services, and can indeed act as the basis for a virtual market place for telecommunications service

Inter-Domain Integration of Services and Service Management

The evolution of the global telecommunications industry into an open services market presents developers of telecommunication service and management systems with many new challenges. Increased competition, complex service provision chains and integrated service offerings require effective techniques for the rapid integration of service and management systems over multiple organisational domains. These integration issues have been examined in the ACTS project Prospect by developing a working set of integrated, managed telecommunications services for a user trial. This paper presents the initial results of this work detailing the technologies and standards used, the architectural approach taken and the application of this approach to specific services

Specification of multiparty audio and video interaction based on the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing

The Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) is an emerging ISO/ITU-T standard. It provides a framework of abstractions based on viewpoints, and it defines five viewpoint languages to model open distributed systems. This paper uses the viewpoint languages to specify multiparty audio/video exchange in distributed systems. To the designers of distributed systems, it shows how the concepts and rules of RM-ODP can be applied.\ud \ud The ODP ¿binding object¿ is an important concept to model continuous data flows in distributed systems. We take this concept as a basis for multiparty audio and video flow exchanges, and we provide five ODP viewpoint specifications, each emphasising a particular concern. To ensure overall correctness, special attention is paid to the mapping between the ODP viewpoint specifications

Engineering telecommunication services with SDL

If formal techniques are to be more widely accepted then they should evolve as current software engineering approaches evolve. Current techniques in the development of distributed systems use interface definition languages (IDLs) as a basis for the underlying communication and also as an abstraction tool. Object-oriented technologies [6] and the idea of engineering software through frameworks [5] are also widely accepted approaches in developing software. In this paper we show how the formal specification language SDL and associated tool support have been applied in the TOSCA1 project to engineer telecommunication services using these current techniques

Experiences in Multi-domain Management Service Development

The developers of management systems and the management services that operate over them will be faced with increasing complexity as services are developed for the open service market. This paper presents experiences in the development of management services that span several administrative domains and which are therefore representative of the complexities of the open service market. The work described involved the development of TMN based management systems that provided management services in support of multimedia teleservices operating over broadband networks

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 QoS monitoring system in a heterogeneous multi-domain DVB-H platform

The MobileTV, IPTV, and DVB standards (DVB-H/T) have been defined to offer mobile users interactive multimedia services with quality of service (QoS) consistency analogous to TV services. However, the market has yet to provide effective and economical solutions for the real-time delivery of such services to the corresponding transmitters over multi-domain IP networks. The monitoring system proposed in this paper enables the QoS in the IP networks involved in the delivery of real-time multimedia content to the transmitters to be ascertained. The system utilizes the QoS parameters defined in MPEG-2 Transport Streams to detect problems occurring in the heterogeneous multi-domain IP networks. The ability to detect problems having an adverse effect on QoS allows appropriate control actions to be determined to recover the QoS across the composite IP network. The design and implementation of the proposed QoS-Monitoring system (QoS-MS) is presented, followed by analysis of experimental results that demonstrate the feasibility of the system

Optimality of Treating Interference as Noise: A Combinatorial Perspective

For single-antenna Gaussian interference channels, we re-formulate the problem of determining the Generalized Degrees of Freedom (GDoF) region achievable by treating interference as Gaussian noise (TIN) derived in [3] from a combinatorial perspective. We show that the TIN power control problem can be cast into an assignment problem, such that the globally optimal power allocation variables can be obtained by well-known polynomial time algorithms. Furthermore, the expression of the TIN-Achievable GDoF region (TINA region) can be substantially simplified with the aid of maximum weighted matchings. We also provide conditions under which the TINA region is a convex polytope that relax those in [3]. For these new conditions, together with a channel connectivity (i.e., interference topology) condition, we show TIN optimality for a new class of interference networks that is not included, nor includes, the class found in [3]. Building on the above insights, we consider the problem of joint link scheduling and power control in wireless networks, which has been widely studied as a basic physical layer mechanism for device-to-device (D2D) communications. Inspired by the relaxed TIN channel strength condition as well as the assignment-based power allocation, we propose a low-complexity GDoF-based distributed link scheduling and power control mechanism (ITLinQ+) that improves upon the ITLinQ scheme proposed in [4] and further improves over the heuristic approach known as FlashLinQ. It is demonstrated by simulation that ITLinQ+ provides significant average network throughput gains over both ITLinQ and FlashLinQ, and yet still maintains the same level of implementation complexity. More notably, the energy efficiency of the newly proposed ITLinQ+ is substantially larger than that of ITLinQ and FlashLinQ, which is desirable for D2D networks formed by battery-powered devices.Comment: A short version has been presented at IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT 2015), Hong Kon

A Service Component-based Accounting and Charging Architecture to Support Interim Mechanisms across Multiple Domains

Today, telematics services are often compositions of different chargeable service components offered by different service providers. To enhance component-based accounting and charging, the service composition information is used to match with the corresponding charging structure of a service session. This enables the sharing of revenues among the service providers, and calculation of the total cost for the end-user. When multiple independent service providers are involved, it is a great challenge to apply interim accounting and charging during a service session in order to minimize financial risks between business partners. Another interesting development is the trend towards outsourcing accounting and charging processes to specialized business partners. This requires a decoupling between provisioning and accounting and charging processes. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive component-based accounting and charging architecture to support service session provisioning across multiple domains. The architecture, modeled in UML, incorporates an interim accounting and charging mechanism to enable the processing and exchange of accounting information needed to update intermediate charges for separate service components and the user's credit, even during the service provisioning phase