The current trend shows that successful next generation communication systems will evolve from network-centric architectures towards service-oriented architectures. "Service differentiation" and "Time-to-market" are seen as necessary aspects to ensure success in this evolving telecommunication world. Mobile users are getting more sophisticated in their demands for useful, personalized application offered at a reasonable price. Future service creation and delivery platforms as key network components are targeting to deliver more creative services more quickly to a service provider's target market. They support objectives for next-generation services, such as the ability to tailor services quickly and flexible for individual customers and to provide an open platform for third-party service development. Systems integrators are bringing together multiple SDP products of different vendors, combining the strengths of these different products, and ensuring to be in a standards-based and open service-oriented environment.
This tutorial starts with an identification of the challenges for creating, provisioning and enabling services in NGN. The need to create a large service portfolio and introduce it quickly to market requires operators to move away from the traditional silo-approach for service developments, as already recognized by fixed and mobile operators. They are starting to invest in IP-based networks and new service platforms. SIP Application Servers IMS and Service Delivery Platforms (SDP) are the services areas that will attract most of the investments. Operators will adopt different strategies for the introduction of SIP Application Server, IMS and SDP, however, markets trends shows that the initial IMS and SDP deployments will speed-up in the next 12 to 24 months, whilst full deployment are expected to follow at later dates.
When it comes to SDP, it is important to stress the fact that there is no comprehensive definition for it, because SDP functionalities do not reside on a single platform, but rather comprise of an integrated set of software modules. These modules collectively enable carriers to launch and manage potentially thousands of services to their customers. We will attempt to introduce and explain the current standardization activities and their technical enablers together with their achievements discussed in alignment with the current market trends. We will provide an extensive overview of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach evolving from the IT world and provide the connection o the Telecom's service oriented architecture approach. This is followed by an in-depth overview of Telecom Standardizations, their SDP evaluation and the roadmaps of next-generation service creation and provisioning solutions. The tutorial concludes with a discussion of the issues and challenges to deploy NGN service platforms and building user-centric services. Biographies:
Dr. Anett Schuelke
Dr. Anett Schülke works as Chief Researcher at NEC Network Laboratories, NEC Europe Ltd., Heidelberg. Dr. Schülke received her PhD in Physics in 1995 from Dresden University of Technology. From 1996 to 1998 she was awarded a DAAD fellowship for the LBNL, California/USA and worked until 1999 as a Postdoctoral Fellow. At July 2000 she joined the NEC Network Laboratories. Dr. Schülke is the Service Platform Architect for the Service Integration Environment and is leading the project group on service creation, provisioning technologies, IMS and content service management with experiences in telecom and data networking research, design and development. She is an active contributor to various evolving standards in OMA. She is currently elected as the OMA POC Vice Chair. She has given various tutorials on IMS earlier and SDP at external conferences as well as company internal. Dr. Schuelke is also the author of 4 patent applications in the area of advanced multimedia service concepts, group-based and context-aware personalized services.
Dr. Daniele Abbadessa
Dr. Daniele Abbadessa received his Master's degree with honors in Electronic Engineering from the University of Catania (Italy) in July 1993 and he became a chartered engineer in December 1993. In January 1994 he joined the Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Bristol (UK) working mainly on telecommunications related projects. He also carried out a Ph.D. on the improvements of service quality in cellular networks at the University of Bristol (UK). In 1998 Dr. Abbadessa moved to Hewlett-Packard professional services and he focused on the pre- and post-sales of network-wide management systems. In December 1999 he joined mmO2 in the UK as senior manager and focused on the operator's long-term strategy of network and service management. From June 2000 to May 2001 Dr. Abbadessa worked for Lucent Technologies in the UK and Italy as bid manager. In June 2001 he moved to the Accenture Centre of Excellence for EMEAI in Sophia Antipolis. In April 2003, Dr. Abbadessa joined NEC Europe Ltd in Heidelberg. He mainly focuses on the analysis of the European wireless market and the development of NEC business in Europe with particular emphasis on the IP Multimedia Subsystem. Dr. Abbadessa is also the author of nine patents on radio frequency planning, management of VoIP and cellular network topology autodiscovery.
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