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Service Control Layer (SCL): Enabling Rule-based Control and Enrichment in Next-Generation Telecom Service Delivery

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Abstract

Telecom operators have started to make significant investments towards evolving their Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) to a next-generation architecture, based on IP technologies and standards such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and increasingly, Web 2.0. These investments are tightly coupled with demands for network middleware infrastructures that allow for rapid service creation and execution, efficient service orchestration and management, and flexible exposure of core network capabilities as services. A key service management functionality of integrated SDP is IP-based service control. Traditionally, service control functionalities have been vertically integrated with service logic and hence, are inflexible and costly to maintain and upgrade. IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), which defines the overlay service architecture for next generation networks, stopped short in designing a flexible service control component. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a service control layer (SCL) for IMS networks, which is flexible on two fronts, viz., the SIP based service modeling for fine grained service control and the programmability of the controlling action implemented by external business services. We present the detailed description of the design and implementation of SCL followed by the results obtained from a performance evaluation exercise that evaluates the scalability of SCL.

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Notes

  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Delivery_Platform.

  2. The reason behind the choice of SIP: Firstly, SIP is based on a simple request-response interaction model that allows developers to interact with individual protocol messages. Secondly, SIP can start/manage/tear-down sessions for any media type, be it voice, video, or application sharing.

  3. If the message is not relevant for the service control requirement, it is simply forwarded to the destination.

  4. With the operators increasingly coming up with new attractive pricing schemes to entice the subscribers, such diverse but short-lived charging scenarios are now norms rather than fancy features and any tightly coupled charging system would understandably fail to adapt to such a dynamically changing space.

  5. SIP service modeling has engaged researchers from the very early days of SIP based service development and deployment. The main objectives of such service modeling range from formal verification [12] to advanced service design [13]. While there are many ways to model a SIP service, we have adopted a simple state machine based approach, with Drools enabling the state machine. One of the merits of a state machine is that it is well understood in the telecom developer community. Telecom service providers have already successfully used state machines in many areas. For example, the protocol Specification and Description Language (SDL) [14]. AT&T research also uses a state machine method for creating CallVantage Service [15]. In contrast to the AT&T and SDL approach, the purpose of a state machine in SCL is to select specific points in service with the help of FPDs.

  6. This corresponds to the pre-paid scenario described earlier.

  7. A key agenda of JSR 289 is to make HTTP (SOAP)-based services available on the same platform with SIP-based services.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge Koustuv Dasgupta and Lee Longmore for valuable technical discussions. They also acknowledge the technical contributions by Li Na Ren, Jia Jia Wen and Qi Yu for SCL development and product testing results.

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Correspondence to Nilanjan Banerjee.

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Banerjee, N., Nagar, S. & Mukherjea, S. Service Control Layer (SCL): Enabling Rule-based Control and Enrichment in Next-Generation Telecom Service Delivery. J Netw Syst Manage 21, 65–98 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-011-9223-z

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