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

Abstract

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 parts of the architecture and a demonstrational “Converged Address Book” use-case are implemented and deployed.