A Parlay and SPIRITS-based architecture for service mediation

Telecommunications service providers today have a great opportunity to leverage third-party content partners and enterprise network-hosted applications to generate new revenue; the industry has two service mediation technologies that are suitable for addressing this: Parlay and session initiation protocol (SIP). Parlay is a family of application programming interfaces (APIs) defined by an industry consortium seeking to standardize a set of abstract high-level interfaces for use by third-party programmers in building applications that leverage the services and functionality exposed by telecommunication network elements. SPIRITS, an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) architecture and associated SIP-based protocol, enables call-processing elements in a telephone network to make service requests that are then processed on Internet-hosted servers. This paper presents a powerful approach for combining the advanced service creation capabilities of the Parlay API with the session control facilities of SIP to leverage the telecommunication network-hosted intelligent networking (IN) services through SPIRITS. © 2003 Lucent Technologies Inc.