Converged Media and Communication Services

Abstract

Converged media and communication services (COMCO) is the conceptual approach of integrating telecommunication, Web 2.0 and Media/IPTV in one architectural approach. Current available service delivery platform (SDP) concepts are silo approaches, which belong more or less to one of the three groups: (mobile/fix) telecommunication SDP, IPTV SDP and pure Web SDP. The groups have in common the integration of OSS/BSS and identity management. A main concept of a SDP is beside the service delivery also easy service creation and thus reduced time-to-market. Such a concept of service creation is covered in the business process model and its view of service dependency and service definition. Service oriented architecture (SOA) is the conceptual framework within such a business process model, as it sees every service as loose coupled functional unit. The recombination of new services can be reduced to the recombination of existing services. So, it is reasonable to apply SOA concepts within a SDP, which also consist of a set of components as 1) telecommunication services (presence, messaging, VoIP call control), 2) Media/IPTV services (media control of VoD and Linear TV) and 3) Web 2.0 services (SOAP access to commercial deployed web services). When it comes to IMS, we speak about a NGN in terms of QoS and gateway to legacy networks (GSM, ISDN, POTS), but also about a SDP in terms of application server and AAA. Speaking strictly, we may use the application server in the context of SDP as abstraction layer towards the NGN. Such application servers poses a service enabler layer which is widely usable towards the trinity of telecommunication, Web 2.0 and IPTV combined in one single SDP concept. This paper addresses the orchestration of these application servers within a SOA inspired process model.