From service delivery to integrated SOA based application delivery in the telecommunication industry

Abstract

Currently, in the Telecommunication industry, the move toward service oriented infrastructures based on Internet Protocol (IP), IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), and Service Delivery Platforms (SDP) can be observed. Communication Service Providers (CSP) are opening parts of their core infrastructure and interfaces to third party developers. Nevertheless, there is still a gap between application developer communities and the Telecommunication industry. CSPs offer their services so developers can use them in their applications but developers do not have any incentives, tools, or development environments that would help them to overcome the barriers of accessing Telecommunication services to build future distributed Web-Telecom-Converged Applications. This research work presents a concept for how to close this gap by conceptualizing an end-to-end platform from Telecommunication core networks and the Internet to end user clients. Requirements of all platform stakeholders are identified and through the combination of SOA platform concepts with Telecommunication SDP architecture concepts and application store application distribution concepts (e.g. Apple AppStore, Google Market) fulfilled. The final result is a concept and logical reference architecture for Application Delivery Platforms (ADP) that extend the concepts of SDPs by broadening the focus from re-usable SOA services over a Web-Telecom-Converged Application architecture and service/application life cycle management to end user applications on client platforms and devices. In order to proof the concepts of the logical ADP reference architecture, central C. Menkens ( ) · M. Wuertinger

Formalizing REST APIs for web-based communication and SIP interworking

“…Menkens and Wuertinger [43] highlight major obstacles towards the development of web-telecom converged applications: i) available specifications for telecom service environments define how telecommunication features can be exposed to third party developers, but they do not provide any concept or paradigm supporting developers in composing telecommunication services with Web services; ii) telecommunications specifications, such as IMS and SIP [58], are not supported by default by widely adopted platforms for mobile devices; and iii) application developers typically adopt Internet and Web protocols and data formats. More specifically, convergence of Web and SIP-based services is considered difficult to achieve, since HTTP and SIP are based on different principles [14,35]: i) typical usage of SIP is stateful, while HTTP is stateless; ii) SIP is peer-oriented while HTTP is based on the client-server paradigm.…”