Design And Implementation Of Telecommunication Value-added Service Supporting Platform Based On ICE Middleware

The profit of traditional telecommunication services is getting descended,and the market capacity is getting saturated as well.Along with the drastic competition, China market competion in telecommunication industry is shifting from resource to business. The characteristic of this competition is personality difference, which leads to quickly and standardization development. Compared with traditional services,thevalue-added services must deal with much more applications,which leads a need to consider more questions and design more complicated interface protocols to solve the problem of isomers in equipments and systems from different departments when value-added services are devised.Now, most of the domestic Service Providers only provided one type of telecommunication value-added service, and adopted the traditional Socket programming technology.That leads to many problems.This paper has introduced middleware technology firstly, and then review several mainly middleware technologies. We discuss the integration, usability and expansibility of middleware specification. We also explained both benefit and shortcoming of mainly middleware. To avoid the disadvantage such as complexity of communication between modules, unreadable code and the Non-uniform application interface, we adopt the ICE (Internet Communications Engine) middleware technology in the supporting platform. The ICE middleware provides the function of defining network communication and interface instead of socket programming and thus improve the readability of the code and the robustness of program.At present, the software architecture of supporting platform is a simple architecture of access layer program with user application. We consider the advantage of ICE middleware and redesign the architecture of this platform. We adopt the distributed multilayer architecture and provide unified interface for applications. The benefits are insuring the consistency of operation and providing programmability to third parties.Furthermore, considering the state of the art, we introduce the concept of soft exchange and develop a soft exchange system. It implements the main function in the supporting platform of call control, resource assignment,routing, certification, accounting etc. And it can also provide all the services circuit exchange can. All the function above is managed by the soft exchange system and this optimizes the architecture.