Blending the telecommunication domain with Web 2.0 services

To stay competitive, operators of modern telecommunication networks are looking for approaches for efficient service creation which would allow for reduction of time-to-market as well as reduction of development and operation costs. Furthermore, they face increasing demand for service interaction across technological borders including telecom, enterprise and Internet services. Telecommunication networks are service-centric and therefore benefit from generic service composition techniques in accordance to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles. In contrast to the IT domain, services in the telecommunication domain are subject to additional requirements such as support for realtime end-to-end communication sessions. The approach presented in this paper uses a technology-agnostic composition functionality characterized by a high-level abstraction in the description of heterogeneous services, constraint-based dynamic service selection and step-by-step execution of composite application models. In order to better fulfill requirements of the telecommunication domain, the approach includes support for end-to-end communication sessions, integration with IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) as well as support for legacy telecommunication technologies such as Intelligent Networks (IN). The presented approach has become part of Ericsson's products and solutions portfolio. The high-level overview of the concept and the description of the architecture are illustrated by means of a detailed description for one of the converged applications implemented with this approach.