Service Creation Environment For IN CS1

Abstract

The main focus of this paper is on IN service creation, test and validation aspects. It reflects the results of the design and development of a Service Creation Tool and a Service Test and Validation platform undertaken by CET/Telecom Portugal within the scope of RACE project R2076 - BOOST. The Service Creation Tool (SCT) is based upon a Meta-CASE tool, that is a generic CASE tool, which was specifically configured for the manipulation of the IN services entities at the IN Conceptual Model Global Functional Plane, that is, the SIBs (Service Independent Building Blocks), SSDs (Service Support Data) for each SIB and CID (Call Instance Data) which supports each execution instance of a service. The SCT supports the creation of new services using all the standard SIBs defined by CCITT in the IN-CS1 documents, plus the ETSI defined SlBs. Some of the standardised SIBs were modified in order to improve their functionality, which was considered very poor for the creation of useful services. An example of this is the SDM (Service Data Management) SIB. The logical and data aspects of the service developed using the SCT are syntactically validated. The final output of the SCT is a generic description of the service using a high-level intermediate language. Using compilation techniques, this mediation language is converted into the target service execution environment language, the so-called Service Logic Program (SLP), which consists of the SIB chains information and respective data templates. The SLID resulting from the service design process can be tested and validated through its execution on a Simulation Environment (SE), before it is passed to the Service Management System (SMS). The SMS is implemented in a TMN Operations System platform which comprises OS-S, OS-N and OS-NE functions. The SE is based on a distributed model of the IN Distributed Functional Plane and Global Functional Plane architectures. This model is implemented using the ANSAware distributed computing platform, and the IN entities (Functional Entity Actions, Information Flows and SIBs) are modelled in terms of ANSA computational objects (capsules) and operations. The resulting service creation tool and service simulation, test and validation platform are used as an SCE for the IN-CS1 experiment being developed by Telecom Portugal/CET and which will undertake the first field trials at the beginning of 1994.