The Dynamic Composition of Personal Network Services for Service Delivery Platforms

Current day telecommunication services are hybrid in nature and involve diverse technologies such as voice, video, or email. Emerging technologies like Personal Area Networks (PAN), Sensor Networks (SN) and machine- to-machine communication further contribute to this hybrid nature and will most likely provide a promising avenue for telecommunication service providers and operators to present novel data services in the future. Current day customers expect intelligent services that can be personalized across multiple devices and are easily accessible. An integration of Personal Network (PN) services into present networking technologies would enhance context awareness, business processes and quality of life in general. Unfortunately, networking systems nowadays have interoperability, flexibility, manageability and mobility deficiencies. In addition, effective, platform independent service discoveries are becoming increasingly important, and this is still a problematic area for PNs. However, transforming isolated PANs or SNs into a service- centric network and providing ubiquitous access to them requires a convenient mechanism for composing the services across multiple networks, providing QoS, and charging the users of the service. The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) provides the core infrastructure needed to integrate islands of networks offering different services and have the potential to enable the above functionality.