Web services for application development in next generation telecommunications networks: An architecture for the common functions

Next generation telecommunications networks aim to provide new value added services to customers. To facilitate the creation of such services, network operators have to open up their networks to applications developers. The service architectures that can be used to develop new services are either signaling protocol neutral or signaling protocol specific. The associated frameworks to each of these architectures share the drawback of requiring knowledge which non-experts may not have. A good way to open up telecommunications networks is to use web services, seen that web services paradigm ease new services development and a wide range of developers are getting acquainted with the technology;; This thesis proposes a novel web services based-architecture that provides functions required for developing, deploying and using web services in telecommunications networks (e.g. security and charging). These functions are called common functions. The proposed architecture is based on requirements that we have identified using as basis the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) ones, which we have extended. It presents each common function as a web service. The architecture components inter-communicate using functions calls. The execution of the common functions is optimized using the execution scope concept that we have defined. It gives the possibility to execute a given common function just when needed.; A proof of concept prototype has also been built and tested using a call control scenario. The taken performance measurements have shown that the overhead induced by using the new proposed architecture is reasonable.