An agile service platform for telecommunication environments

A framework for lowering the borders of service delivery and service composition in telecommunication networks is proposed in this work. In our opinion such an agile framework is needed for two main reasons. At first the cycle of introducing new services in the telecommunication industry usually takes several months, while the general cycles in the Web domain are much faster. Besides, customers want to use a flexible amount of services from different kinds of sources (e.g. Google, Facebook). The proposed agile service environment is intended to interact with services of the traditional telecommunication industry and is enabling the third party development process to support services coming from all kind of domains. Service platforms for Next Generation Networks adapting the principles of Service Oriented Architectures and the initial steps in the standardization towards service delivery frameworks are done. Special requirements that have to be considered are aspects of service life-cycle management and service composition that are critical regarding high performing real-time communication processes as needed in a telecommunications environment. Beyond the requirements of dynamic service deployment, management, evolution and service termination there is the intention of a well performing agile service composition mechanism. In order to fulfill the discussed requirements some related work in this area is presented and the promising IT / Network standards are enlightened. Furthermore, the architectural design of the developed framework is presented. Finally the paper demonstrates a practical use case scenario that shows the dynamic integration and combination of telecommunication services with services of the Web domain.