A seeded design environment for service creation

IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part C (Applications and Reviews), 2003

Value added services, or more simply-services, are the critical ingredient for the success and the survival of Internet Telephony. Services can be defined as anything that goes beyond two party voice calls. Some examples are multiparty gaming, customized stock quotes and call screening. This paper focuses on service creation in Internet Telephony. Service creation plays a major role in Internet Telephony because it enables openness and programmability by offering frameworks for the development of value added services. Two principal sets of standards have emerged for Internet Telephony: H.323 from the ITU-T and SIP from the IETF. No service creation framework comes with the H.323 set. Two frameworks come with the SIP set: the Call Processing Language (CPL) and the SIP common gateway interface (CGI). Besides the IETF, other forums such as Parlay and JAIN have proposed pertinent frameworks. The first part of the paper provides an overview of the service creation frameworks for Internet Telephony. A common characteristic of these frameworks is that they require knowledge that nonexperts may not have (e.g., scripts, programming languages). High-level service creation environments may help these nonexperts. The second part of the paper presents a case study on a high level service creation environment (SCE) where pre-defined graphical components are combined into services. The environment is discussed in detail along with the service logic execution environment (SLEE) where the services are executed. The SCE and SLEE make no assumption on the service creation framework supported by the network, and any of the standard frameworks could be used provided it offers the functionality abstracted in the graphical components. We have used the Parlay APIs as a framework and the prototype is built for a SIP environment. The prototype is described and the lessons we have learned are presented. Index Terms-Internet telephony, open APIs, service creation and execution environments, value added services. I. INTRODUCTION S ERVICE creation is used to refer to the set of activities related to the specification, design and testing of value added services in telephony networks. It is sometimes called service construction [1], or service programming [2]. Value added services, or more simply-services, are defined as anything that goes beyond two-party voice calls. Service creation is critical

2008

With Telecom market reaching saturation in many geographies and revenues from voice calls decreasing, Telecom operators are trying to identify new sources of revenue. For this purpose, these operators can take advantage of their core functionalities like Location, Call Control, etc. by exposing them as services to be composed by developers with third party offerings available over the Web. To hide the complexity of underlying Telecom protocols from application developers, the operators are steadily adopting Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and reference standards like Parlay-X and IMS. However, a number of challenges still remain in rapid utilization of Telecom functionalities for creating new applications -existence of multiple protocols, different classes of developers, and the need to coordinate and manage usage of these functionalities. In this paper, we present SewNet, a framework for creating applications exploiting Telecom functionality exposed over a (converged) IP network. More specifically, SewNet a) provides an abstraction model for encapsulating invocation, coordination and enrichment of the Telecom functionalities, b) renders a service creation environment on top of this model, and c) caters to various different categories of developers. With the help of two use-case scenarios, we demonstrate how SewNet can create services utilizing rich Telecom functionality.

IEEE GLOBECOM 2008 - 2008 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, 2008

The creation of services is a complex activity that involves several tasks. Furthermore this complexity is augmented by the fact that supporting service creation environments are technology-specific. Consequently a technology-independent approach and framework are required to generate service creation environments and drive service creation. In this paper we present such an approach and a generic framework for supporting service creation. The approach realizes service creation via the phases of: (i) domain specific language definition, (ii) model definition and validation, (iii) model-to-model transformation and (iv) model-to-code generation. Each phase maps to a corresponding phase in service creation starting from service analysis to service implementation. The applicability of the approach and its accompanying framework is demonstrated via an example scenario that illustrates the automatic generation of a service creation environment for an online survey system.

Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems, 1996

2005

The generalization of Internet continues to grow unabated, especially with the rapid adoption of the mobile and fixed wireless connecting a myriad of devices at homes and businesses. It allows us to have more and more services at low costs. In the future, anyone with any kind of devices at any times will have options to access any service from anywhere. In fulfilling this requirement, more rapid and profitable methods of service creation must be examined. This article describes a new language named SCDL (service creation description language) that can be used for service creation environment.

1999

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.

16th IST Mobile and …, 2007

Computer Networks, 1999

This paper describes experiences in using SDL and its associated tools to create telecommunication services by producing and specialising object-oriented frameworks. The chosen approach recognises the need for the rapid creation of validated telecommunication services. It introduces two stages to service creation rstly a software expert produces a service framework, and secondly a telecommunications 'business consultant' who specialises the framework by means of graphical tools to rapidly produce services. Here we focus on the underlying technology required. In particular we highlight the advantages of SDL and tools as well as issues and problems incurred.

1999

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 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 TOSCA 1 project to engineer telecommunication services using these current techniques.

Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services - iiWAS '08, 2008

The telecom service providers (fixed and mobile) understand that they must bring in new smart services in order to attract new customers, retain existing ones and increase revenue. The challenges and goals for doing so are as follows: determining which services are needed; introducing more services in a faster manner and at lower costs; delivering innovative services in a way that allows existing users to migrate smoothly to new ones. These goals could not be achieved with traditional closed and proprietary network infrastructure, as the vendor lock-in involved in that infrastructure results in limited scope of services, and dependency on old business models. New services require a much greater degree of system flexibility, performance and scalability, as well as open standards. Next Generation Network (NGN) provide the means for enabling agile service creation capabilities that facilitate better user experiences by integrating both new and legacy services across any access. However, NGNs involve complex structures even for simple services as they consist of a large number of building blocks and necessitate hierarchical models with a lot of parallel subsystems. Thus, particular attention has to be paid to understanding and modelling the performance of these systems. The rationale of this paper lies in developing a design and engineering methodology (based on a mathematical foundation) that addresses the service creation aspects for those fields in which traditional approaches will not work for NGNs.