Structuring the next generation network using a standards-based service delivery platform

The Next Generation Network (NGN) represents a telecommunications network that provides a variety of services to customers across converged telco, enterprise and Internet infrastructures. The NGN promotes separation of service implementations from network infrastructure by using service enablers. Service enablers are reusable abstractions that provide access to network capabilities. Enablers are used by applications to create services for customers and offer external enterprises access to NGN capabilities. No appropriate NGN service platform architecture is standardised to date. This paper shows how services and service enablers are defined and structured within a standards-based NGN service platform architecture. We motivate the Service Delivery Platform (SDP) framework for standardising the NGN service platform architecture. The SDP framework defines an extendable, technology-neutral service platform architecture. The framework consists of building blocks structured according to Generic Service Oriented Architectures (GSOAs) presented here. The GSOAs are implementable using standards-based technologies. After providing background on the NGN, we elaborate on the SDP and GSOA. We present our SDP framework using multiple GSOAs. In addition, we discuss and evaluate a SDP implementation.