Network Exposure
Today’s modern telecom network has a plethora of equipment and communication protocols. Different networks, protocols and equipment is involved to deliver the service dependent on the device’s capabilities, the user’s location, traffic load, the subscriber’s subscription and policy, the network and service policy and so forth. All of which is essential to deliver a fully-functional and useful service. Once this is in place, however, there are many useful services that can be delivered over this infrastructure – services that use the connectivity and transport layers – but do not need any awareness of these details.
Such services may be provided by the telecom operator, third parties with which they have a contractual arrangement or if desired, directly “over-the-top” by third parties where there is no permanent commercial relationship. The user authentication, security and service availability details are different for each of these, but the core requirement is the same: expose the service enablers and other operator/network capabilities such as charging interfaces for other IT systems to use.
Formerly, such network and service enabler exposure was difficult to achieve and cumbersome to use. Nowadays however, modern IT systems typically expose their capabilities to other systems as web services in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Representational state transfer (REST) is a powerful request-response SOA that is very simple to use that enables two systems to cooperate. One system (the client) can use the services provided by another (the server). This concept may be used to expose telecom service enablers for use by other IT systems for the delivery of content and to create new hybrid IT/telecom service applications.
OneAPI provides standardised RESTful interfaces to the telecom service layer for use by other IT systems has opened up many new possibilities for revenue generation and the delivery of services that are more specific to the individual user.
RESTful exposure of network/service enablers for content delivery and the creation of enhanced value-added telecom services is a key requirement for any next generation telecom service layer.