Modular exposure of next generation network services to enterprises and testbed federations

This paper describes how next generation network and IP multimedia subsystem services provided by Telco networks as well as testbeds and testbed federations can be used in a modular fashion to compose high level multimedia services. The IP multimedia subsystem, specified by the 3rd generation partnership projects (3GPP and 3GPP2), was developed to address next generation network convergence challenges and end-user requirements. As an all-IP overlay network architecture, it aims at providing a platform for provisioning services in a secure and controllable manner, merging the paradigms and technologies of the Internet with the cellular and fixed telecommunication worlds and was also adopted for the Next generation network architecture of ETSI TISPAN. In this paper we will outline the requirements on service description, service discovery and service orchestration in next generation networks and distributed testbed environments. We will further describe how to make use of service building blocks to expose network functionalities towards higher service abstraction layers. We will finally display our findings in the light of the Open SOA Telco Playground, one of the Fraunhofer FOKUS testbeds that represents today a first approach to the practical implementation of the ideas described.