Enabling Delivery of Mobile Services Over Heterogeneous Converged Infrastructures

Traditionally, end customers have been offered different categories of communication, data and media services (e.g., fixed/mobile voice, fixed/mobile data, broadcasting) through vertically separated, rigidly integrated infrastructures. Major advances in a variety of technological fields, mainly in the area of mobile computing and networking, have created prospects for a fully converged environment, where ubiquitous access to an abundance of value-added services will be offered over a single, as perceived by the users, highly reconfigurable system. This vision can be enabled by the seamless “plugging” of diverse access networks to a high-speed IP backbone; however the path to its realization poses a variety of additional challenges. The required support of complicated business models and service delivery over highly diverse contexts introduces significant complexity to service management and provision. The present contribution presents object-oriented mediating service management platforms as a catalyst for making these demanding tasks feasible, identifies their desired functionality and provides an overview of such a distributed framework that we have designed and prototyped. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the latter is able to be a critical enabler of flexible, adaptable service provision over future heterogeneous networks, while supporting advanced business paradigms.