Service Delivery Platform
Encyclopedia
In telecommunications, the term Service Delivery Platform (SDP) usually refers to a set of components that provide a services delivery architecture (such as service creation, session control and protocols) for a type of service. There is no standard definition of SDP in the industry although the TM Forum
(TMF) is working on defining specifications in this area, but different players define its components, breadth and depth in slightly different ways.
SDPs often require integration of telecom and IT capabilities and the creation of services that cross technology and network boundaries. SDPs available today tend to be optimized for the delivery of a service in a given technological or network domain (e.g. web, IMS
, IPTV, Mobile TV, etc.). They typically provide environments for service control, creation, and orchestration and execution, as well as abstractions for media control, presence/location, integration, and other low-level communications capabilities. SDPs are applicable to both consumer and business applications.
The business objective of implementing the SDP is to enable rapid development and deployment of new converged multimedia services, from basic POTS
phone services to complex audio/video conferencing for multiplayer game
s (MPGs).
The emergence of Application Stores, to create, host and deliver applications for devices such as Apple's iPhone
and Google Android smartphones, has focused on SDPs as a means for Communication Service Providers (CSPs) to generate revenue from data. Using the SDP to expose their network assets to both the internal and external development communities, including web 2.0 developers, CSPs can manage the lifecycles of thousands of applications and their developers.
Telecommunications companies like Telcordia Technologies
, Nokia Siemens Networks
, Nortel
, Avaya
, Ericsson
and Alcatel-Lucent
have provided communications integration interfaces and infrastructure since the early to mid 1990s. The cost-saving success of IP-based VoIP systems as replacements for proprietary private branch exchange (PBX) systems and desktop phones has prompted a shift in industry focus from proprietary systems to open, standard technologies.
This change to open environments has drawn software focused telecommunication companies like Teligent Telecom
and HP - Communication & Media Solutions to this segment and has also given systems integrators such as Tieto, Accenture
, IBM
, TCS
, HP
, Alcatel-Lucent
, Tech Mahindra
, Infosys
, Wipro
, Xavient
and CGI
the opportunity to offer integration services. In addition, new consortia of telecommunications software product companies are also emerging that offer pre-integrated software products to create SDPs based on key product elements, such as convergent billing and content/partner relationship management.
Since SDPs are capable of crossing technology boundaries, a wide range of blended applications become possible, for example:
, a flexible compromise between the absolutes of the dumb terminal and the logic-heavy client PC. Although entrants into the application server ring were many and varied, they shared common advantages: database vendor abstraction, open standard (mostly object-oriented) programming models, high availability and scalability characteristics, and presentation frameworks, among others. These transformations were triggered by business forces including the rampaging tidal wave that was the Internet boom, but none of it would have been possible without the proliferation of standards such as the TCP/IP protocol, the Java
programming language, and the Java EE web application server architecture. It is against this backdrop of transformation that telecom's era of rapid change was set in motion.
Up until the first few years of 2000, the markets for commercial and business telecommunication technologies were still saturated with proprietary hardware and software. Open standards started to become popular as IP technologies were introduced and with the rapid expansion of Voice-over-IP (VoIP) for transmission of voice data over packet networks and the Session Initiation Protocol
(SIP) for standardized media control, especially regarding enterprise voice communication.
In this new standards-supported environment, convergence of the voice and data worlds has become less a moniker for disastrous telecom/IT integration attempts and more a true avenue for the production of new and better consumer and business services. The last few years have seen the introduction or proliferation of various SIP programming libraries (reSIProcate, Aricent
, MjSip and its derived port by HSC) and products based on the relatively new SIP standard, and the IP Multimedia Subsystem
standard defined by the 3GPP
has gained a huge following. The Service Delivery Platform, whose power comes in large part from the quality and acceptance of these supporting standards, is rapidly gaining acceptance as a widely applicable architectural pattern.
In industry today there are multiple definitions of Service Delivery Platform (SDP) being used with no established consensus as to a common meaning. Because of this, and the need for service providers to understand how to better manage SDPs, the TM Forum
(TMF) has started standardizing the concept of Service Delivery Framework (SDF) and SDF management. The SDF definition provides the terminology and concepts needed to reference the various components involved, such as applications and enablers, network and service exposure, and orchestration.
What is needed to deliver a blend of personalized services from multiple SDPs to end users is a means to inter-work those SDPs through common service enablers and network resources.
Underpinning these service aspects though has been a fundamental concept that the user's attributes and the services they receive require a common repository and a common data model, such as those provided by a LDAP/X.500 directory or HSS database. Early SDP implementations of this nature started in the mid / late 1990s for ISP converged services. Larger and more complex SDPs have been implemented over the last 5 years in MSO type environments and for mobile operators.
SDPs: Their Context and Next Generation Systems
SDPs are commonly considered for the telco type environments as a core system which interconnects the customer's access and network infrastructure with the OSS systems and BSS systems. SDPs in this context are usually associated to a particular service regime such as mobile telephones or for converged services.
SDPs are also considered in the context of very large transformation, convergence and integration programs which require a considerable budget. The difficulty in such projects is that there may be hundreds of thousands of design and implementation decisions to be made - once the architecture is agreed. Naturally this issue alone dictates the need for software development and operational engineering skills. Probably the best way of reducing these design and integration issues is to simulate the SDP on a small scale system before the major project actually starts. This allows the solution architecture to be verified that it meets the operational, service delivery and business requirements.
In the new world of converged service delivery, SDPs should also be considered not just as a core function within an operator but as a number of interconnected, distributed service nodes (e.g.) for redundancy reasons and for different service profiles to different business and market sectors. Many operators provide commercial scale/grade products such as bundled voice, web hosting, VPNs, mail, conference and messaging facilities to government and corporate clients. The evolution of such bundled services could be from fragmented management systems to a "Virtual Private Service Environment" where the operator runs a dedicated SDP for each of its customers who require their services on demand and under their control.
SDPs can also be used to manage independent wireless enabled precincts such as shopping malls, airports, retirement villages, outcare centres. In this case a "lightweight" easy to deploy platform could be used. See wwite: Next Generation Governance and Service Delivery Platform.
The purpose of the SCE is to facilitate the rapid creation of new communication services. Ignoring factors like marketing for the moment, the easier it is for developers to create services for a given platform, the greater will be the number of available services, and thus the acceptance of the platform by the broader telecom market. Therefore, a telecom infrastructure provider can gain significant advantage with an SDP that provides for rapid service creation.
The leveraging of converged Java EE and SIP service creation environments has accelerated the adoption of specific Service Delivery Platform solutions. Java-based applications developers, traditionally focused on IT applications, are now rapidly developing real-time communications applications using Java EE and network connecting protocols like SIP and Parlay X
web services. Software vendors are combining these technologies (e.g., Oracle Jdeveloper and Oracle Communication and Mobility Server with basic Eclipse plug-in) to reach out to a broader developer base.
The implementation of standards remains a critical factor in Presence applications. The implementation of standards such as SIP and SIMPLE (Session Initiation Protocol for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) is becoming more prevalent. SIMPLE Presence provides a standard portable and secure interface to manipulate presence information between a SIMPLE client (watcher) and a presence server (presence agent). See JSR 164 for SIMPLE Presence. Providers of SIMPLE Presence servers include Oracle and Italtel.
in a complete end-to-end solution strive to minimize integration needs via standards-based interfaces and web services.
Software vendors who provide end-to-end solution for the IT SDP, Business Support Systems, Operating Support Systems, and SOA middleware suites include HP, wwite, IBM, Oracle and Sun microsystems. Network equipment vendors also provide SDPs such as IMS, IPTV, Mobile TV, etc. and offer the evolution of these SDPs.
(SOA) concept. Discussions that once centered on Enterprise Application Integration
(EAI) technologies and concepts have shifted into the SOA domain, favoring ideas like service composition over simple message adaptation and extract, transform, and load
techniques.
SOAs can be used as an application integration technology within an SDP but are best served when used in the lower performance functions such as connections between the transactional OSS
and BSS applications and the SDP. SOAs need careful consideration if they are to meet the real time demands placed on the SDP by the converged event type services.
An analogue concept to SDP found in the realm of SOA is that of Web Service Ecosystem (also known as Web Service Marketplace) and the SaaS platform. A Web Service Ecosystem is a hosted environment in which participants expose their services using common Web technology such as HTTP, XML
, SOAP
or AJAX
. This hosted environment provides a number of service delivery components covering aspects such as authentication, identity management, usage metering and analytics, content adaptation, data format conversion, charging and payment. This enables service providers to focus on their core functionality and to outsource the service delivery to third parties. Services deployed over Web Service Ecosystems may be business-critical, but they typically do not have the real-time and high-performance requirements associated to telecommunications services for which SDPs are traditionally conceived. They usually support common business functions such as quoting, order management, marketing campaign management or customer care. SOA can also be used to standardize operational processes and re-use them across SDPs.
Operators can be faced with annual multi-millon dollar electricity bills for their systems. It follows that multi-server/multi-database SDPs are not earth-friendly or cost-effective, if the same functions can be integrated and use much less power.
Identity and Information Management: In order to specify or design a SDP we must determine what the customer and device service dimension is. If the SDP design needs to accommodate, say, 1m users as well as manage their devices and each identitified item requires 5 to 10 information objects, the core SDP is probably dealing 20m objects in real time. As the management of these objects dictate the core identity management processes of the platform, critical attention should be applied to the way in which they are implemented. Experience has shown that a single user on a converged services SDP may require 100 objects of information with some objects such as preferences containg 100 attributes. Capacity requirements for 10m users would indicate the platform needs to support 1 billion objects and up to 50 billion attributes.
Group Identity and Entitlement: Traditionally we have dealt with Identity Management as a single user or device logging on with a name and password and have assumed that an Identity Server holding names and passwords solves the issue. Practically though in the MSO world, we have account holders, secondary account holders (the children of the family), guests, gifts, content, devices, preferences which must all link together in order to receive a managed service.
The services the grouped identity receives might be authorized via name and passwords, but should only be enabled through entitlements that relate to product provisioning.
SDP architectures need to accommodate group identity management and product/service entitlement functions.
Presence and Events: Presence is the status management of all online assets. But what does this mean to system architectures? Traditionally we have applied a "transactional" paradigm where for example a user logs on and creates a transaction onto a network switch, a web server or database application. Presence services means we are managing status events at rates much, much higher than our traditional transactional systems.
The question is: how are millions if not billions of events managed in fragmented systems, multiple database architectures or in fact frameworks?
SDP architectures should also have a coherent, highly integrated event management system as a core function.
Converged Identities:
An operational issue emerges with 3G IMS and SIP and converged services. SIP can apply IP addresses (IPv4 or v6), SIP URIs (email addresses) and SIP TEL URIs (telephone numbers) in its message To, From, Via and Contact fields. Such identifiers can point to a telephone device, a fridge door, a content farm, a single piece of content, a user or even a group of users. This flexibility means that a SIP call can be made from just about anything to any other thing providing it is entitled to do so. As SIP can apply a mixture of these Internet and Telephone system identifiers in the call process, it follows that the SDP must tightly couple its SIP processing with the DHCP/DNS system, the HSS mobile database, the User authorization system, the presence event system, the user's address book, telephone call feature processing and the operator's service/product management with its entitlement system - all in real time. It follows that such functionality would be very difficult to apply across many interconnected functions and fragmented databases using "SOAs".
SDP technologies and tool kits should address three fundamental issues:
These three major system requirements actually dictate the architecture of a real world operational SDP regardless of the "abstract labels" one applies to its logical models, SOAs, message bus protocols and server interconnects. If these fundamental requirements are omitted from the SDP design it leaves the operator with many business, service management and operational problems to address, such as:
In some situations MSOs have millions of lines of hard coded product and service management flows in their systems and are unable to move to the newer converged service dimensions easily.
A quick test of an SDP design is to evaluate its information model and see if that is based on the user environments of converged services, and see how that model is used and managed by all the systems that need to including its presence and event management functions.
In support of SDP development and the evolution to real time, agile services-delivery, next-generation systems should be considered.
TM Forum
The TeleManagement Forum formerly the Network Management Forum, is an international non-profit industry association, for service providers and their suppliers in the information industry, the telecommunications industry and the entertainment industry.Members include telephone companies, cable...
(TMF) is working on defining specifications in this area, but different players define its components, breadth and depth in slightly different ways.
SDPs often require integration of telecom and IT capabilities and the creation of services that cross technology and network boundaries. SDPs available today tend to be optimized for the delivery of a service in a given technological or network domain (e.g. web, IMS
IP Multimedia Subsystem
The IP Multimedia Subsystem or IP Multimedia Core Network Subsystem is an architectural framework for delivering Internet Protocol multimedia services. It was originally designed by the wireless standards body 3rd Generation Partnership Project , as a part of the vision for evolving mobile...
, IPTV, Mobile TV, etc.). They typically provide environments for service control, creation, and orchestration and execution, as well as abstractions for media control, presence/location, integration, and other low-level communications capabilities. SDPs are applicable to both consumer and business applications.
The business objective of implementing the SDP is to enable rapid development and deployment of new converged multimedia services, from basic POTS
Plain old telephone service
Plain old telephone service is the voice-grade telephone service that remains the basic form of residential and small business service connection to the telephone network in many parts of the world....
phone services to complex audio/video conferencing for multiplayer game
Multiplayer game
A multiplayer video game is one which more than one person can play in the same game environment at the same time. Unlike most other games, computer and video games are often single-player activities that put the player against preprogrammed challenges and/or AI-controlled opponents, which often...
s (MPGs).
The emergence of Application Stores, to create, host and deliver applications for devices such as Apple's iPhone
IPhone
The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...
and Google Android smartphones, has focused on SDPs as a means for Communication Service Providers (CSPs) to generate revenue from data. Using the SDP to expose their network assets to both the internal and external development communities, including web 2.0 developers, CSPs can manage the lifecycles of thousands of applications and their developers.
Telecommunications companies like Telcordia Technologies
Telcordia Technologies
Telcordia Technologies, formerly Bell Communications Research, Inc. or Bellcore, is a telecommunications research and development company based in the United States created as part of the 1982 Modification of Final Judgment that broke up American Telephone & Telegraph...
, Nokia Siemens Networks
Nokia Siemens Networks
Nokia Siemens Networks is a global data networking and telecommunications equipment company headquartered in Espoo, Finland. It is a joint venture between Nokia of Finland and Siemens of Germany...
, Nortel
Nortel
Nortel Networks Corporation, formerly known as Northern Telecom Limited and sometimes known simply as Nortel, was a multinational telecommunications equipment manufacturer headquartered in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada...
, Avaya
Avaya
Avaya Inc. is a privately held computer networking, information technology and telecommunications company that is a global provider of business communications systems. The international head quarters is in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, United States...
, Ericsson
Ericsson
Ericsson , one of Sweden's largest companies, is a provider of telecommunication and data communication systems, and related services, covering a range of technologies, including especially mobile networks...
and Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel-Lucent is a global telecommunications corporation, headquartered in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, France. It provides telecommunications solutions to service providers, enterprises, and governments around the world, enabling these customers to deliver voice, data, and video services...
have provided communications integration interfaces and infrastructure since the early to mid 1990s. The cost-saving success of IP-based VoIP systems as replacements for proprietary private branch exchange (PBX) systems and desktop phones has prompted a shift in industry focus from proprietary systems to open, standard technologies.
This change to open environments has drawn software focused telecommunication companies like Teligent Telecom
Teligent Telecom
Teligent Telecom is a company based in Nynäshamn Sweden, which produces and markets Value Added Services for Telecommunication operators, such as Voicemail, Mobile Office, IN services, IMS Service Brokers and Real-time Charging Gateways...
and HP - Communication & Media Solutions to this segment and has also given systems integrators such as Tieto, Accenture
Accenture
Accenture plc is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company headquartered in Dublin, Republic of Ireland. It is the largest consulting firm in the world and is a Fortune Global 500 company. As of September 2011, the company had more than 236,000 employees across...
, IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
, TCS
Tata Consultancy Services
Tata Consultancy Services Limited is a global IT services, business solutions and outsourcing company headquartered in Mumbai, India. It is the largest provider of information technology in Asia and second largest provider of business process outsourcing services in India...
, HP
Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...
, Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel-Lucent is a global telecommunications corporation, headquartered in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, France. It provides telecommunications solutions to service providers, enterprises, and governments around the world, enabling these customers to deliver voice, data, and video services...
, Tech Mahindra
Tech Mahindra
Tech Mahindra Limited is a provider of information technology , networking technology solutions and business process outsourcing services to the global telecommunications industry. Headquartered at Pune, India...
, Infosys
Infosys
Infosys Limited, formerly Infosys Technologies Limited is a global technology services company headquartered in Bangalore, India. It is the second largest IT exporter in India with 133,560 employees as of March 2011. It has offices in 33 countries and development centers in India, China,...
, Wipro
Wipro
Wipro Limited formally Western India Products Limited is a global IT services and consulting company headquartered in Bangalore, India. As of 2011, Wipro is the second largest IT services company by turnover in India and employs more than 120,000 people worldwide as of March 2011...
, Xavient
Xavient
Xavient Information Systems Inc, headquartered in Simi Valley, California, is a provider of global IT Services providing outsourcing and technology solutions to the telecommunication industry. It has multiple locations in the USA and offshore delivery centers in India...
and CGI
Common Gateway Interface
The Common Gateway Interface is a standard method for web servers software to delegate the generation of web pages to executable files...
the opportunity to offer integration services. In addition, new consortia of telecommunications software product companies are also emerging that offer pre-integrated software products to create SDPs based on key product elements, such as convergent billing and content/partner relationship management.
Since SDPs are capable of crossing technology boundaries, a wide range of blended applications become possible, for example:
- Users can see incoming phone calls (Wireline or Wireless), IM buddies (PC) or the locations of friends (GPS Enabled Device) on their television screen
- Users can order VoD (Video On Demand) services from their mobile phones or watch streaming video that they have ordered as a video package for both home and mobile phone
- Airline customers receive a text message from an automated system regarding a flight cancellationFlight cancellationFlight cancellation occurs when an airline cancels a scheduled flight for a certain reason. When flights are canceled, passengers may be entitled to compensation due to rules obeyed by every flight company, usually Rule 240, or Rule 218 in certain locations...
, and can then opt to use a voice or interactive self-service interface to reschedule
History
The late 1990s saw a period of unprecedented change in enterprise applications as the grip of client-server architectures gradually relaxed and allowed the entrance of n-tiered architectures. This represented the advent of the application serverApplication server
An application server is a software framework that provides an environment in which applications can run, no matter what the applications are or what they do...
, a flexible compromise between the absolutes of the dumb terminal and the logic-heavy client PC. Although entrants into the application server ring were many and varied, they shared common advantages: database vendor abstraction, open standard (mostly object-oriented) programming models, high availability and scalability characteristics, and presentation frameworks, among others. These transformations were triggered by business forces including the rampaging tidal wave that was the Internet boom, but none of it would have been possible without the proliferation of standards such as the TCP/IP protocol, the Java
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
programming language, and the Java EE web application server architecture. It is against this backdrop of transformation that telecom's era of rapid change was set in motion.
Up until the first few years of 2000, the markets for commercial and business telecommunication technologies were still saturated with proprietary hardware and software. Open standards started to become popular as IP technologies were introduced and with the rapid expansion of Voice-over-IP (VoIP) for transmission of voice data over packet networks and the Session Initiation Protocol
Session Initiation Protocol
The Session Initiation Protocol is an IETF-defined signaling protocol widely used for controlling communication sessions such as voice and video calls over Internet Protocol . The protocol can be used for creating, modifying and terminating two-party or multiparty sessions...
(SIP) for standardized media control, especially regarding enterprise voice communication.
In this new standards-supported environment, convergence of the voice and data worlds has become less a moniker for disastrous telecom/IT integration attempts and more a true avenue for the production of new and better consumer and business services. The last few years have seen the introduction or proliferation of various SIP programming libraries (reSIProcate, Aricent
Aricent
Aricent Group is a global innovation and technology services company. The company develops software and provides technology services to application, infrastructure, and service providers with operations in 19 countries worldwide....
, MjSip and its derived port by HSC) and products based on the relatively new SIP standard, and the IP Multimedia Subsystem
IP Multimedia Subsystem
The IP Multimedia Subsystem or IP Multimedia Core Network Subsystem is an architectural framework for delivering Internet Protocol multimedia services. It was originally designed by the wireless standards body 3rd Generation Partnership Project , as a part of the vision for evolving mobile...
standard defined by the 3GPP
3GPP
The 3rd Generation Partnership Project is a collaboration between groups of telecommunications associations, known as the Organizational Partners...
has gained a huge following. The Service Delivery Platform, whose power comes in large part from the quality and acceptance of these supporting standards, is rapidly gaining acceptance as a widely applicable architectural pattern.
In industry today there are multiple definitions of Service Delivery Platform (SDP) being used with no established consensus as to a common meaning. Because of this, and the need for service providers to understand how to better manage SDPs, the TM Forum
TM Forum
The TeleManagement Forum formerly the Network Management Forum, is an international non-profit industry association, for service providers and their suppliers in the information industry, the telecommunications industry and the entertainment industry.Members include telephone companies, cable...
(TMF) has started standardizing the concept of Service Delivery Framework (SDF) and SDF management. The SDF definition provides the terminology and concepts needed to reference the various components involved, such as applications and enablers, network and service exposure, and orchestration.
What is needed to deliver a blend of personalized services from multiple SDPs to end users is a means to inter-work those SDPs through common service enablers and network resources.
Underpinning these service aspects though has been a fundamental concept that the user's attributes and the services they receive require a common repository and a common data model, such as those provided by a LDAP/X.500 directory or HSS database. Early SDP implementations of this nature started in the mid / late 1990s for ISP converged services. Larger and more complex SDPs have been implemented over the last 5 years in MSO type environments and for mobile operators.
SDPs: Their Context and Next Generation Systems
SDPs are commonly considered for the telco type environments as a core system which interconnects the customer's access and network infrastructure with the OSS systems and BSS systems. SDPs in this context are usually associated to a particular service regime such as mobile telephones or for converged services.
SDPs are also considered in the context of very large transformation, convergence and integration programs which require a considerable budget. The difficulty in such projects is that there may be hundreds of thousands of design and implementation decisions to be made - once the architecture is agreed. Naturally this issue alone dictates the need for software development and operational engineering skills. Probably the best way of reducing these design and integration issues is to simulate the SDP on a small scale system before the major project actually starts. This allows the solution architecture to be verified that it meets the operational, service delivery and business requirements.
In the new world of converged service delivery, SDPs should also be considered not just as a core function within an operator but as a number of interconnected, distributed service nodes (e.g.) for redundancy reasons and for different service profiles to different business and market sectors. Many operators provide commercial scale/grade products such as bundled voice, web hosting, VPNs, mail, conference and messaging facilities to government and corporate clients. The evolution of such bundled services could be from fragmented management systems to a "Virtual Private Service Environment" where the operator runs a dedicated SDP for each of its customers who require their services on demand and under their control.
SDPs can also be used to manage independent wireless enabled precincts such as shopping malls, airports, retirement villages, outcare centres. In this case a "lightweight" easy to deploy platform could be used. See wwite: Next Generation Governance and Service Delivery Platform.
Service Creation Environment
Often a telecom software developer's primary access point, the Service Creation Environment (SCE, also Application Creation Environment or Integrated Development Environment) is used by the developer to create software, scripts, and resources representing the services to be exposed. These can range in complexity from basic Eclipse plug-ins (as with Ubiquity's UDS, or Ubiquity Development Studio) to completely abstracted, metadata-driven telecom application modeling applications (like Avaya's discontinued CRM Central product).The purpose of the SCE is to facilitate the rapid creation of new communication services. Ignoring factors like marketing for the moment, the easier it is for developers to create services for a given platform, the greater will be the number of available services, and thus the acceptance of the platform by the broader telecom market. Therefore, a telecom infrastructure provider can gain significant advantage with an SDP that provides for rapid service creation.
The leveraging of converged Java EE and SIP service creation environments has accelerated the adoption of specific Service Delivery Platform solutions. Java-based applications developers, traditionally focused on IT applications, are now rapidly developing real-time communications applications using Java EE and network connecting protocols like SIP and Parlay X
Parlay X
Parlay X was a set of standard Web service APIs for the telephone network .It's defunct and now replaced by OneAPI, which is the current valid standard from the GSM association for Telecom third party API....
web services. Software vendors are combining these technologies (e.g., Oracle Jdeveloper and Oracle Communication and Mobility Server with basic Eclipse plug-in) to reach out to a broader developer base.
Presence/Location
One aspects of an SDP is that it must be centered on the new "point of presence". This is the point of user access to their converged services where their preferences and entitlements are evaluated in real time. Preference and entitlement processing ensures that the user's services in their device/location contexts are delivered correctly. As entitlements are related to the product and service management regimes of the operator, the core architecture of an SDP should define managed products, services, users, preference and entitlement processes.The implementation of standards remains a critical factor in Presence applications. The implementation of standards such as SIP and SIMPLE (Session Initiation Protocol for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) is becoming more prevalent. SIMPLE Presence provides a standard portable and secure interface to manipulate presence information between a SIMPLE client (watcher) and a presence server (presence agent). See JSR 164 for SIMPLE Presence. Providers of SIMPLE Presence servers include Oracle and Italtel.
Integration
The use of standards for exposure for interfaces across SDPs and within the SDP should minimize the need for integration in three main areas: (1) southbound to underlying network core components (2) between support application such as CRM, billing, and service activation (3) third party applications and services. The implementation of SOAService-oriented architecture
In software engineering, a Service-Oriented Architecture is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are well-defined business functionalities that are built as software components that can be reused for...
in a complete end-to-end solution strive to minimize integration needs via standards-based interfaces and web services.
Software vendors who provide end-to-end solution for the IT SDP, Business Support Systems, Operating Support Systems, and SOA middleware suites include HP, wwite, IBM, Oracle and Sun microsystems. Network equipment vendors also provide SDPs such as IMS, IPTV, Mobile TV, etc. and offer the evolution of these SDPs.
Relationship to SOA
Much has been made in recent years of the Service-oriented architectureService-oriented architecture
In software engineering, a Service-Oriented Architecture is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are well-defined business functionalities that are built as software components that can be reused for...
(SOA) concept. Discussions that once centered on Enterprise Application Integration
Enterprise application integration
Enterprise Application Integration is defined as the use of software and computer systems architectural principles to integrate a set of enterprise computer applications.- Overview :...
(EAI) technologies and concepts have shifted into the SOA domain, favoring ideas like service composition over simple message adaptation and extract, transform, and load
Extract, transform, load
Extract, transform and load is a process in database usage and especially in data warehousing that involves:* Extracting data from outside sources* Transforming it to fit operational needs...
techniques.
SOAs can be used as an application integration technology within an SDP but are best served when used in the lower performance functions such as connections between the transactional OSS
Operations support system
Operations support systems are computer systems used by telecommunications service providers. The term OSS most frequently describes "network systems" dealing with the telecom network itself, supporting processes such as maintaining network inventory, provisioning services, configuring network...
and BSS applications and the SDP. SOAs need careful consideration if they are to meet the real time demands placed on the SDP by the converged event type services.
An analogue concept to SDP found in the realm of SOA is that of Web Service Ecosystem (also known as Web Service Marketplace) and the SaaS platform. A Web Service Ecosystem is a hosted environment in which participants expose their services using common Web technology such as HTTP, XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
, SOAP
SOAP
SOAP, originally defined as Simple Object Access Protocol, is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services in computer networks...
or AJAX
Ajax (programming)
Ajax is a group of interrelated web development methods used on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications...
. This hosted environment provides a number of service delivery components covering aspects such as authentication, identity management, usage metering and analytics, content adaptation, data format conversion, charging and payment. This enables service providers to focus on their core functionality and to outsource the service delivery to third parties. Services deployed over Web Service Ecosystems may be business-critical, but they typically do not have the real-time and high-performance requirements associated to telecommunications services for which SDPs are traditionally conceived. They usually support common business functions such as quoting, order management, marketing campaign management or customer care. SOA can also be used to standardize operational processes and re-use them across SDPs.
Implementing SDPs
Considerable changes in IT and Network architecture are required when implementing real-world, real-time, converged services, operational SDPs. Many SDPs are designed as abstract frameworks with diagrams that use labels such as "Service Abstraction Layer", etc. Within real systems such "layers" do not actually exist. In addition it is difficult to realise from abstract diagrams what the real-world operational data model is and how many servers, databases or directories might be used or integrated to form converged services SDP and self care functions.Operators can be faced with annual multi-millon dollar electricity bills for their systems. It follows that multi-server/multi-database SDPs are not earth-friendly or cost-effective, if the same functions can be integrated and use much less power.
Identity and Information Management: In order to specify or design a SDP we must determine what the customer and device service dimension is. If the SDP design needs to accommodate, say, 1m users as well as manage their devices and each identitified item requires 5 to 10 information objects, the core SDP is probably dealing 20m objects in real time. As the management of these objects dictate the core identity management processes of the platform, critical attention should be applied to the way in which they are implemented. Experience has shown that a single user on a converged services SDP may require 100 objects of information with some objects such as preferences containg 100 attributes. Capacity requirements for 10m users would indicate the platform needs to support 1 billion objects and up to 50 billion attributes.
Group Identity and Entitlement: Traditionally we have dealt with Identity Management as a single user or device logging on with a name and password and have assumed that an Identity Server holding names and passwords solves the issue. Practically though in the MSO world, we have account holders, secondary account holders (the children of the family), guests, gifts, content, devices, preferences which must all link together in order to receive a managed service.
The services the grouped identity receives might be authorized via name and passwords, but should only be enabled through entitlements that relate to product provisioning.
SDP architectures need to accommodate group identity management and product/service entitlement functions.
Presence and Events: Presence is the status management of all online assets. But what does this mean to system architectures? Traditionally we have applied a "transactional" paradigm where for example a user logs on and creates a transaction onto a network switch, a web server or database application. Presence services means we are managing status events at rates much, much higher than our traditional transactional systems.
The question is: how are millions if not billions of events managed in fragmented systems, multiple database architectures or in fact frameworks?
SDP architectures should also have a coherent, highly integrated event management system as a core function.
Converged Identities:
An operational issue emerges with 3G IMS and SIP and converged services. SIP can apply IP addresses (IPv4 or v6), SIP URIs (email addresses) and SIP TEL URIs (telephone numbers) in its message To, From, Via and Contact fields. Such identifiers can point to a telephone device, a fridge door, a content farm, a single piece of content, a user or even a group of users. This flexibility means that a SIP call can be made from just about anything to any other thing providing it is entitled to do so. As SIP can apply a mixture of these Internet and Telephone system identifiers in the call process, it follows that the SDP must tightly couple its SIP processing with the DHCP/DNS system, the HSS mobile database, the User authorization system, the presence event system, the user's address book, telephone call feature processing and the operator's service/product management with its entitlement system - all in real time. It follows that such functionality would be very difficult to apply across many interconnected functions and fragmented databases using "SOAs".
SDP technologies and tool kits should address three fundamental issues:
- What are the goods and services being offered and managed in a real time fashion by the operator and by the customer self care systems - and this includes the management of presence based services (the world of the event driven internet) and how realtime user entitlements are processed.
- What is the converged services information model used in the SDP design that represents the online business of the operator that has subscribers, devices, phone calls, preferences, entitlements, address books etc. to deal with. In many cases MSOs with just 10 million customers require an SDP with 500 million information items - and for these items to be accessed many thousands of times a second by many different SDP functions.
- What is the event / presence management architecture used in the SDP design that handles the velocity of the online business events. The situation might be that the population of a city arriving home at night might generate billions of online status events. How will these be processed by the SDP?
These three major system requirements actually dictate the architecture of a real world operational SDP regardless of the "abstract labels" one applies to its logical models, SOAs, message bus protocols and server interconnects. If these fundamental requirements are omitted from the SDP design it leaves the operator with many business, service management and operational problems to address, such as:
- identity management (of all the information in the SDP representing the operators online assets),
- the SDP's service agility (that is the product and services being offered are hard coded into the SDP so that new services cause code upgrades) and;
- hard wired self care facilities (no flexibility or consideration of the SDPs users such as language, age, sighted, preferences, etc.).
In some situations MSOs have millions of lines of hard coded product and service management flows in their systems and are unable to move to the newer converged service dimensions easily.
A quick test of an SDP design is to evaluate its information model and see if that is based on the user environments of converged services, and see how that model is used and managed by all the systems that need to including its presence and event management functions.
In support of SDP development and the evolution to real time, agile services-delivery, next-generation systems should be considered.
See also
- Directory services play a critical role within an SDP. See Directory serviceDirectory serviceA directory service is the software system that stores, organizes and provides access to information in a directory. In software engineering, a directory is a map between names and values. It allows the lookup of values given a name, similar to a dictionary...
and Identity managementIdentity managementIdentity management is a broad administrative area that deals with identifying individuals in a system and controlling access to the resources in that system by placing restrictions on the established identities of the individuals.Identity management is multidisciplinary and covers many...
. - IP Multimedia SubsystemIP Multimedia SubsystemThe IP Multimedia Subsystem or IP Multimedia Core Network Subsystem is an architectural framework for delivering Internet Protocol multimedia services. It was originally designed by the wireless standards body 3rd Generation Partnership Project , as a part of the vision for evolving mobile...
- Next Generation NetworkingNext Generation NetworkingNext-generation network is a broad term used to describe key architectural evolutions in telecommunication core and access networks. The general idea behind the NGN is that one network transports all information and services by encapsulating these into packets, similar to those used on the...
- Enterprise Service BusEnterprise service busAn enterprise service bus is a software architecture model used for designing and implementing the interaction and communication between mutually interacting software applications in Service Oriented Architecture...
Integration platform commonly used for Enterprise Application IntegrationEnterprise application integrationEnterprise Application Integration is defined as the use of software and computer systems architectural principles to integrate a set of enterprise computer applications.- Overview :... - Java Business IntegrationJava Business IntegrationJava Business Integration is a specification developed under the Java Community Process for an approach to implementing a service-oriented architecture . The JCP reference is JSR 208 for JBI 1.0 and JSR 312 for JBI 2.0....
Standardisation of the Enterprise Service Bus in the Java world - 3GPP3GPPThe 3rd Generation Partnership Project is a collaboration between groups of telecommunications associations, known as the Organizational Partners...
Standards - Open Mobile AllianceOpen Mobile AllianceThe Open Mobile Alliance is a standards body which develops open standards for the mobile phone industry.- Principles :Mission: To provide interoperable service enablers working across countries, operators and mobile terminals....
Standards concerning integration of network elements, operations support systemOperations support systemOperations support systems are computer systems used by telecommunications service providers. The term OSS most frequently describes "network systems" dealing with the telecom network itself, supporting processes such as maintaining network inventory, provisioning services, configuring network...
s and Business Support Systems - ParlayParlay'Parlay/OSA' was an open API for the telephone network. It was developed by The Parlay Group, which worked closely with ETSI and 3GPP, which all co-publish it. Within 3GPP, Parlay is part of Open Services Architecture.- Overview :...
, Parlay XParlay XParlay X was a set of standard Web service APIs for the telephone network .It's defunct and now replaced by OneAPI, which is the current valid standard from the GSM association for Telecom third party API....
Standards concerning integration of network elements, operations support systems and business support systems - JSLEEJSLEEA Service Logic Execution Environment is a well known concept in the telecommunications industry. A SLEE is a high throughput, low latency event processing application environment...
, Java Service Logic Execution Environment, the Java standard for event-driven application servers used in Service Delivery Platforms - Session Initiation ProtocolSession Initiation ProtocolThe Session Initiation Protocol is an IETF-defined signaling protocol widely used for controlling communication sessions such as voice and video calls over Internet Protocol . The protocol can be used for creating, modifying and terminating two-party or multiparty sessions...
Standard protocol for IP-communication - Java Specification Requests (JSR) for operations support systems
- Service delivery frameworkService delivery frameworkA service delivery framework is a set of principles, standards, policies and constraints used to guide the design, development, deployment, operation and retirement of services delivered by a service provider with a view to offering a consistent service experience to a specific user community in a...
External links
- Accenture: The Coming of 4G and the New Path to High Performance
- Infonetics Webinar-Using a Service Delivery Environment to Provide Flexible, Billable High-Margin Services
- Alcatel-Lucent - What is an SDE?
- Telcordia Service Delivery
- Teligent: Convergent multiservice, multinetwork SDP
- Devoteam Teligent: Service Delivery Platform (SDP) Solutions (rus) | (eng)
- HP Service Delivery Platform
- Ericsson Service Delivery Platform