IN Service Interaction
IN Service Interaction
Telecommunications Services
Telecommunications operators in general and mobile telecoms operators in particular all sell the same, limited voice and messaging product set. Person to person voice and messaging forms the heart of the service offer of all telecoms operators and continues to account for the vast majority of mobile operator revenues.
Beyond simple PSTN geographic connectivity, the majority of voice and message connectivity is provided by Intelligent Network (IN) platforms. The IN authorises and controls the call or session. It often meters and charges for the calls and sessions. The mobile network is an intelligent network. To meet these needs with exceptional reliability under an enormous volume of concurrent calls, IN platforms are engineered as tightly integrated software and hardware stacks. For the same reasons, the services that they host are stream-lined, relatively simple and standard services. Today’s IN is built on a proprietary software stack using old design and programming models.
Modern software engineering approaches that:
- provide a “safe” runtime environment that isolates the behaviour of the code from the platform and other services, and
- facilitate the re-use of proven service software to build other services;
cannot be used.
Every line of IN code has to be crafted and the service logic and inter-dependencies tested by a small number of highly skilled IN engineering staff. The natural consequence is that IN is also complex, inflexible, time-consuming and costly to adapt.
The case for TDM IN Service Innovation
The SIP Application Server and Service Delivery Platform (SDP) concepts in IMS are designed to facilitate service innovation and eliminate the rigidities of today’s IN platforms. Yet the subscriber base resides predominantly on TDM networks. As of course, does the revenue.
Rhino IN SIS allows service innovation in person-to-person communications (voice, messaging and video) on today’s TDM networks. It brings open, application server technology into the service layer of TDM networks alongside the existing IN SCP. Using Rhino IN SIS, existing IN SCP assets can be used as “service capability” building blocks and re-used to compose new, variant services. Rhino IN SIS provides service composition and interaction capabilities for TDM networks in the same manner as envisaged in the IMS architectural blueprint.
Existing IN services do not need to be altered to be managed when using the Rhino IN SIS environment. Additional service logic can be added pre and post-service invocation within the call/session path. Existing services may be hosted on the Rhino Application Server or on one or more remote Application Servers or IN SCPs.
Additionally new services can also be developed cost effectively and deployed using the OpenCloud Application Server and integrated into the SIS environment. Rhino IN SIS, in common with Rhino IMS SCIM, provides a scriptable interface for service composition and interaction. New services are created from existing services using XML.