Multi-Technology Service Composition for the Telecommunication Domain - Concepts and Experiences

Telecommunication networks are service centric and therefore benefit from service composition techniques in accordance to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles. Furthermore, services in the telecommunication domain are subject to specific requirements such as support for end-to-end communication sessions and mechanisms for service interaction across technological borders including telecom, enterprise and Internet services. The presented approach uses a technology-agnostic core composition function, which is comprised of high-level abstraction in the description of heterogeneous services, constraint-based dynamic service selection and step-by-step instantiation of abstract composite application models. In order to better support telecommunication services, these concepts were combined with support for sessions, integration with IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) and support for legacy telecommunication technologies such as Intelligent Networks (IN) [1]. The presented composition approach has become part of products and solutions. This paper reports our experiences regarding the applicability of the technology, efficiency of the composite service development and performance of services composed using this approach.